>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE I'm in the Palo Alto CUBE Studios here with the quarantine crew, doing the remote interviews during this time of COVID. Of course, we want to check in with all of our great esteemed guests and CUBE alumni. We're here with Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock. Jerry, great to see you, it's been a while. Hope you're sheltering in place, nice camera, nice set up you got there at home, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John. I set up all the cameras are just for you. Everybody needs their quarantine hobbies, and for me, I kind of dust off the audio visual playbook and set this up, just for theCUBE interviews. But it's good to see you. Glad you and the family are healthy and sane as well. >> Yeah, and same to you. Let's just jump into it, obviously, COVID-19 has caused the virtualization trend, virtual everything. You're no stranger to virtualization, and VMware back in the day really changed the game on server virtualization, but the whole world's becoming virtual. And it's very interesting because now people are feeling, but we in the industry have been talking about inside the ropes for a long time, which is, the future is there, it's going to be about interactions online, software, cloud scale, these things just got accelerated, and the disruption, the change of behavior, Zoom fatigue, Webexing, all this stuff that's happening, people are kind of like, "Wow! This is the future." This is a real impact, and it's mainstream, everyone's feeling about business, to personal, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think Satya Nadella at Microsoft had this quote recently that they've seen two decade's worth of digital acceleration and transformation in just two months, and I think what we've seen the past four months, John is all the kind of first order effects of virtualization events, not just infrastructure, but like virtualization meetings and people, telemedicine, telehealth, online education, delivery of food, all those trends are just accelerated. We're buying stuff on eCommerce, and Amazon, and Instacart before hand, that's just accelerated. We're moving towards virtualized events, online education, online healthcare, that's just accelerated. So I think we're seeing the first order effects of changing not only how we work, how we communicate, but how we shop, interact, and socialize, it compress two decades within two, three months. And so I think that's changing both how you and I interact and how we build relationships, also how companies interact with their customers, and how companies interact with employees. and it's been exciting time, because one, when there's disruption, there's opportunity, but two is giving guys like you and me a chance to kind of dust off or try new skills, and you and I are both figuring out how to exist and thrive in this role where we're now interacting in this virtualized world. >> And it's still the same game personal relationships. Content is now data. This is stuff that we've been preaching on theCUBE. You've been on many times talking about, I going to get your thoughts as a venture capitalist, whether you're making bets on the future for investments, you have a 10 year horizon, and roughly speaking average on VC deals, enterprises and customers who are building a cloud and data centers, they got to make new bets or double down on stuff they've been doing, or cancel stuff that they had going on, and refactoring. So I want to to get your thoughts on one, first on the VC side, how have you guys refactored your thinking, your meetings, and your bets? >> Yeah, so I would say, three areas, one is how we operate as a VC firm what's changed? Number two, I'll talk about what we're investing in what's good or bad, and thirdly is like, what I think changes for our portfolio companies and how startups think. So first and foremost obviously, we've gone all virtual too, with shelter-in-place, our entire team is now working remotely, working from home, but we're still open for business and we're looking to find new investments, we are investing aggressively right now, and we're just doing things over Zoom. And so we're either A, doing video calls as a partnership, or doing video calls with startups that we're meeting and founders, but I'll be honest, one thing I've done John, is I've turned off the screen more or less, I've done more phone calls because I find that a video call is great for the first or second meeting, but with a founder or executive you have relationship with, it's just really nice to actually, go on a virtual walk where me and the founder of both put AirPods or take the phone to walk outside and kind of have a conversation, that's a little of a higher bandwidth. So, I think how we're operating has changed a little bit, but to your point, is the same business, connecting with a person one-on-one, reading the market, reading the founder, and making a bet. So that hasn't changed. I think on the stuff we're investing in, like you said, all the trends around cloud and APIs and SaaS, that's accelerated. So all the trends around the new workplace, SaaS companies, collaboration, going cloud that's accelerated faster, so some of our companies like Cato Networks that does software defined, wide area networks plus cloud security that just accelerated there in this market called secure access serves edge. We've seen kind of a nice tailwind from that, more and more data is going to cloud so companies like Rockset, that's a database company that you had on theCUBE, they're going to see a benefit from that because more and more data is now in the cloud. Then finally for the founders we work with, the way to go to market, the way to sell like no one's flying around selling one-on-one anymore, you're not meeting a CSO, or the CIO over steak dinner, or you're not going to a conference anymore. So a lot of our companies are figuring out how to do more online sales, bottoms ups adoption, that could be an API, that could be open source, we're trying to find a couple more of our line of business entry to the company and sell that way, versus go to a conference or for one-on-one meeting. So it's interesting, everything's moved faster, but then this slight curve ball on how you connect with your customer has changed. And so what's the Darwin line, it's not the strongest that survives, but the most adaptable. So we're seeing the companies that founders that are most adaptable right now, they're going to thrive. >> It's interesting, we've always talked about from a tech standpoint with DevOps and cloud-native, integration or horizontally scalable has been that ethos of value creation, you've talked about moats in the past, but now it's more real life, is becoming immersed into software, and so I want to get your thoughts on this, and we have a phrase here in theCUBE team is that, every company will become a media company, that's something that we believe in, and you starting to see that people are doing more Zooms, doing more digital events, you mentioned some of the other things. Can you see any other examples where a company has to become blank? Because media is just one element of the new realities of life, right? You got to broadcast, and you got to share your stories and formats, that's media, is there other areas we're seeing, that things that weren't on the radar before with COVID, where companies have to become something like, every company will be blank? Fill in the blank. >> I would say, it's trite to say one, one, was every company is a data company, people have been saying that for a while, that's more true than ever. Number two, I'll be honest, every company now is a healthcare company, right? Because be it in health insurance for employees, the current pandemic is making the reality of both physical health, and emotional health, and mental health key for employees. And so if that was a top cost factor for hiring employees, this could be even more important going forward that every company is a health care company. And thirdly, like you said, every company becomes media company, I would say every company is also either one or two things, they're a Fintech company, because every company is now going online with their content. They wanting to create a one-to-one commercial relationship with a customer, right? That could be ads, could be transaction, could be selling something, so you're now doing business directly with your customer, so every company is a Fintech company, and I would say every company's now also, like you said, content company, right? It's the media creating, but also the data you're taking, the value you add on top of the data you're creating, and then how you share that back to your customer. So you as an enterprise company or a consumer company, you collect data from users, you're to use that data to improve your product, and this could be a SaaS offering, this could be an application, but then take that data through real time analytics, then make your product better and so because of that, if you're a data company, real time data, like our database company mentioned earlier, Rockset becomes more important. If you're a Fintech company, so all things around payments or commercial banking and relationship with your customer make sense. And if a you're a healthcare company because all your employees are now caring about healthcare, just thinking about how to make communication of healthcare with employees a lot more efficient, and a part of the reason why to work for theCUBE and work for a startup is important, so I think those three things are top of mind for all employees and all employers. I think things could change the next six or nine months, but right now I see those three being front and center. >> It's interesting. I wonder if you can add real estate company to that because if you look at the work from home, it's dynamic. >> Yeah >> I had a friend who was a fellow dad with my son's lacrosse team, he lives in Los Gatos, he's been involved in Google, Tesla, building up their facilities, and he had an interesting guest post on SiliconANGLE, and he was saying, it's not just give them some extra pay for their internet access, companies got to rethink the facilities question, right? Because do you pay rent for your employees? Do you provide the VPN, beyond VPN security, for instance? So again, you start to see these new opportunities or challenges, open up new thinking, this is going to be a wave of opportunity. >> Well, that virtualization between work and home has now been blurred like you said earlier, John and so if you're a technology company that enables remote access or distribute access, like Cato Networks when the portfolio comes and Greylock around our road office, home office, that is now how to right? So I had this conversation with Jason of Austin, askSpoke, one of our companies, there's like a mass of hierarchy for working out, and at the base of the mass of hierarchy is like good internet access, right? That's the how to, you need security, right? Because if you don't have secure access, you can't work, and then you have information management, knowledge management, how to communicate, right? And then collaboration, so, you have now this new hierarchy of what is required you to work in this new world, but also the tools and the technologies, be it secured access service edge like CATO or IT Helpdesk for all employees like askSpoke, both of those things become dial tone for any remote work. Just like videoconferencing, we couldn't do this in the same way, 10, 15 years ago, that's become kind of a must have, and so I think it'd be fascinating how we went from the office world where I gave you a laptop, or a computer, or a desk to this home office world, where maybe you now I have to pay for my fancy camera setup and my VPN. >> Well certainly you're getting good ROI on your setup and sure Greylock will take care of that plenty of dough big, billions of dollars under management. And by the way, must have hire things in our houses, ping and internet access, so we fight for that ping time, I got 12 I'm like what's going on? Who's gaming? We have to get the kids off of Twitch, and whatnot. but in all seriousness, this is what the reality is. So now for the average person out there, there's a lot of discussion around mental health, you mentioned taking it off the video conferencing and going for a walk, or just talking on the phone, this speaks to the humanization aspect of what's going on, mental health, social interaction, we're social creatures, collaboration has to be re-imagined. What's your view on all this? >> I think absolutely, look, humans are social creatures by nature, and I think part of the reason why I had this conversation with my founders early during COVID-19, that it's both a healthcare crisis. It's an economic crisis with all the million and millions of people unemployed, but it's also an emotional crisis because one, we're not connected to family, friends, and loved ones, and we're sheltering home with either ourselves or just a handful of people. And so we're trying to figure out ways to like, recreate social connections, and that's a phone call, it's a video call, it's Zoom dinners, it's Zoom dinners, the Zoom parties, is key. I think, going on socially just in walks is another thing to kind of like, play and experience things together. But my two cents is if you're a startup, right now, it can help connect people work-wise or socially, that's just going to be super critical for the new experience. And I think people are discovering new ways to use technology, so Zoom was never meant to be used the way it is today, I think that's amazing. I think how people think about voice video, and email, and chat are changing as well. So I'll finding new ways to like, play games online with my nieces, or communicate with them. And I think as an employer in these companies, like HR software, and how you like manage, and coach, and lead your employees is going to change as well. And so, you have this world where we're all in one building, and think about how you as a CEO, or as a leader now can actually coach, develop, and enable your employees across the world. >> I want to get your thoughts on cloud, we've had many conversations around cloud computing as to rise of AWS, I remember one it was a big Twitter conversation, I think about last year where what enabled Amazon and I think one of the things that came out of it was virtualization enabled them to have all these different servers. What do you see coming out of this virtualization of our lives with the COVID-19, as people start to figure out beyond the triage of stabilization, and as they get foundationally set up in COVID, coming out of it, companies and people have to have a growth strategy, whether it's life or business, people want to come out of this on the upside, whether it's emotional or with their business, what do you see being enabled? What needs to be in place? What kind of scale? What kind of environment? Because this is where I think the entrepreneurs are really going to sharpen their energy on their creativities looking at the expectations and experience needed coming out of this, it may look completely different than what we were talking about a year ago. What's your thoughts? >> Well, I think individually, people can use this time to prove their skills in different ways. So I think as an employee, as CEO, as a founder, you take the time to like invest in new skills, and that could be, "Hey, how do our community collaborate and manage my team remotely?" So I think CEOs and founders that can understand how to motivate, educate, train their employees in this new world, well, those are skills going forward. So communication has always been a great skill John, for any leader, any founder, it's 10X more important in this new virtualized work role, communication, motivation, and leading people over remote work is going to be a new skill that people have. Managing remote teams, managing fully distributed teams or half distributed, half headquarters, so understanding how to organize and lead your team in this kind of half in the office half out of the office role, that's going to be a challenge as well. So any tools, technology and tips there, but I think in terms of the founders that can now hire employees, find customers, sell customers, and manage a distributed team, those three things in this new world, even post COVID-19, we're not going back to the way we were, so the ability to actually use skills around email, creating content, Slack, Zoom, video chat, online conferences, what was that? "Video Killed the Radio Star", the first MTV Video. So, COVID-19, and Zoom, and video collaboration, what's that do to the old skills or the old founders? And what do they enable? So just like TV replaced radio as a medium, and now this virtualized world is going to replace kind of the medium we had beforehand, so, there'll be new generation of founders and investors coming out of this generation that would be for the next 10, 15 years, and I'm excited to be part of that. >> Yeah, and it's super big opportunity, because you have these kind of medium changes, new protocols get developed, new responsibilities and roles emerge, value creation capture, equations change, right? So you're looking at things like online events, for instance, they don't happen anymore, and even when they do come back they'll probably be hybrid anyway. So you got virtual, hybrid, public it sounds like a cloud play to me, public events, hybrid events, and private events, I guess. >> Yeah, virtual private events, but the same thing holds, just like cloud internet increased the reach, right? So all of a sudden, you can reach a bigger audience than just radio, TV, or the newspaper. Now you have these virtualized events like say private events, public events, hybrid events, you as a company or a media property, like theCUBE can now reach a larger audience, right? It's global, you don't have to be there in person, you're going to have the remote audience as a first class citizen, now more than ever, it's just like the internet replacing newspaper and print, people really care about print and newspaper, but really the reach online is always a magnitude larger than print, so all of a sudden you thought more about the print, so the online audience more than print audience. So now going forward, you're going to think about the virtual audience that's remote versus the physical audience. And so you're going to have to create experiences that are their world class or both properties. So just like the cloud, you think about the big three cloud providers, private cloud, as a technology company, you think about all three venues, all three infrastructures as a first class citizen. It's not going to be all one cloud, it's not all going to be one note, if you will. So it forces everyone to think, not just kind of one path, but multiple paths, so like classic problems a lot of founders think, okay, I'm going to do an enterprise private cloud strategy only or I'm going to do a cloud only SaaS strategy. Now founders of this do both the same time, I got to address the private cloud on premise business at the same time as the cloud business, and not just one cloud, three or four clouds around the world. So it forces founders to be able to do more things at one time and the ability for a company to attack multiple venues or multiple territories at the same time, they'll be successful. And the days where I can just do one cloud or one venue, or one audience, those are gone, and so, folks like yourself, John, and what you've built here at theCUBE with everyone else, they can reach multiple audiences at the same time, that's going to be very powerful. >> And we're going to be marketing and doing a lot more online events, like you said, it's going to be easier to tap into our 7000 plus alumni to get people together to create great content. And again, content value to remote audience is interesting. So that shifts into the conversation that everyone talks about the remote worker. Well, what about the remote customer, the remote prospects? So this is going to change how companies have to be change of behaviors. And it's going to be driven by developers, because it's not like one app can solve it, 'cause you got to integrate, you got to have some integration points. So this is the question, are we moving away from that monolithic SaaS app? Or is it going to be some SaaS apps that need to integrate with others? Will there be an abstraction layer of innovation around? Because at the end of the day, these new workloads and new apps going to be built. If you're going to run an event, if I'm a SAP or a big company, I'm not going to rely or may not want to rely on a vendor. In fact, the CEO of SAP said, 'cause their site crashed for their event, "I'm not going to rely on a third party to run my business event." 'Cause their business model is the event, not just a supplier selection for a SaaS app. So interesting kind of new surge of online activity might tip the scales for the supplier side. >> I think you're right John, I think because now the, just like the IT technology is now your business, you're going to basically do one or two things, one, vet the IT technology provider that much higher or harder. But number two to your point, I think the way you sell and you reach companies is going to be through developers and yes, you're going to have these large monolithic SaaS apps before, but almost every SaaS app now has APIs for integration, and so to your point, is that integration and the ability to have multiple companies work together, and share data, and collaborate, that's going to be more important. And so really at Greylock and myself, I've been investing in developer-led technologies and developer-led adoption, or API, or open source-led adoption, for seven plus years now. And the truth of matter is, that's going to be even more powerful going forward. Nassim Taleb would say that's anti-fragile, right? So having one giant app is fragile, but having a bunch of small apps, or a bunch of APIs, or a bunch of developers using your open source technology, or using your API technology to build an application, that's anti-fragile, because at the end of the day, that's going to be more reliable for your customer than a single point of failure, which can be one giant application. So all the big apps like Salesforce, have now other platforms, right? They have APIs, they have extensibility, they understand that there's a long fat tail of solutions needed to build. And all the new startups are doing open source, or API-led adoption 'cause they understand that the fastest route to create value for the customer, is also the most robust technology stack that a customer can build upon. I think that's super insightful, in fact, that is, I think so compelling, because if you think about it, that's the formula for great investments from a startup standpoint. But now, because of COVID, you said, everything's been pulled forward and accelerated at the same time, there's a collision, not all the enterprises are that strong, they're not that developer-led. So I think, to the point about acceleration, now, the enterprises, and we've seen pockets of this with cybersecurity where they have their own, in-house teams doing a variety of different development. The customers have to be developer-led, because that's where the value is, so they have to have a supplier with the right stack and integration frameworks. Now, the customers who haven't really been developer-led, have to be developer-led, what's your take on that? >> Absolutely true. 20 years ago, the CIO of a company that used to be the monopoly supplier technology for the company, they decided what hardware to use, what servers, what stores to use, what applications to buy. And then all of a sudden, like Amazon came around and said, "Well, look, here's a set of APIs, go build what you want." And so the competition for kind of like the centralized decision making became Amazon. And guess what? CIOs reacted, they got better, they got smarter, and those that embrace kind of like an API developer-led adoption, became the CIOs you wanted to have in the company. So I think, CIOs in this cloud mobile era have adopted that philosophy that, look, my job now as the CIO is to enable my developers, my employees, which really the assets of the company is the people, to have the right tools. So you're asked a bunch of cloud APIs, like Rockset or whatever for data, or here's a bunch of resources, or open source technologies for you to pull. So like I invested in a company recently called Chronosphere, it's an open source technology around metrics and monitoring. So, "Hey, use this open source time series database for monitoring your cloud and build upon that," and they're not going to say, "We're going to pick one large vendor that's monolithic," we're going to say, "Here's an open source tech company or a cloud API, go build upon that." And the companies that are embracing that philosophy of API-led or developer-led, John, they're going to be far ahead the better CIOs, the better companies, because the rate of digital adoption has just gone exponential, so we were on this super fast path already, and with quarantine in COVID, we've accelerated all that digital transformation, so every brick-and-mortar retailer now has to be eCommerce retailer. So they're making a slow digital transformation to go from brick-and-mortar stores to online stores. Now like brick-and-mortar retail is pretty much not happening, and probably won't come back to the same levels for a while, they need to accelerate their move towards digital transformation, right? >> And IT certainly exposes the people who haven't really made those investments, because literally action and the mandate, now take action, make those changes, totally want to dig into this developer-led vision, because I think that's very real. And the new decision is going to be made on what to do. I'm happy to see the DevOps thinking, the agile, speed become the table stakes. So with that, this week, Google is having their nine-week digital event of 200 plus sessions, essentially, an asynchronous event, it's going to be sprinkled out, they've kind of pretty much released the videos, most of them today. Over the next eight, nine weeks, you're going to see a lot of videos. Google, one of the big three got AWS, Azure, Google, what's your assessment of the horses on the track relative to the cloud? >> I've been talking about this for seven, eight, nine years, I first met it, like in the first or second Amazon reinvent and what was the forecast? And we said, well, it's not a winner take all, but right now, it's a winner take most. Amazon's clearly the market share leader, Azure coming up quickly behind the enterprise, Google's a third but they're doing some smart things around technology. Google announced a bunch of things today, which I think are very smart. So for example, they announced BigQuery Omni, which is BigQuery that's in query, their kind of a data warehouse, also query data and private cloud Azure or Amazon. And so strategically, if you're the number three player, you're going to push a multi-cloud agenda with BigQuery Omni, or Google Anthos, which is kind of a multi-cloud platform. And for Google, I think is the right strategy. I also think it's the right strategy for most customers to be multi-cloud, because you can't be dependent upon, a single point of failure in your applications. You can't be dependent on a single cloud as well. So I think multi-cloud is probably the direction we're headed as cloud matures. And I think Google's making a bunch of the right choices around embracing multi-cloud, and today they made that choice with BigQuery Omni, and so I think they're playing catch up but they're playing that game. I think Amazon's clue is still in the lead and still it blows my mind, and it's continuing to impress me what they've done over the past 10 years in terms of improving the cloud offering and the cloud services up and down the stack, and I think the past five, six years, what Azure has done, has been super impressive in terms of, Microsoft embracing, open source embracing, cloud as an ethos against their legacy business of operating systems and servers on premise, they've done a great job of embracing the next generation. But I do think, looking around the corner this new developer-led mindset is going to matter, right? So the cloud tomorrow will be APIs, like Stripe for payments, Twilio for communication. So I see the next evolution not just being VMs and containers, but also a bunch of cloud services around data, security, and privacy. And the cloud vendors can build this next generation of database APIs, or privacy APIs, security APIs, that they're going to be in the catbird seat for the next 10 years of applications are going to be built. >> And it'll be interesting to your developer-led position, our conversation around that, if the developer is going to be leading, is it going to be an abstraction layer across multiple clouds? Or do I have to have my Google developers, and my Amazon developers, and my Azure developers? How do you see that playing out? Because I do believe developer-led is the way, the question is, how do you avoid forking resources, right? So you might want to have an (mumbles) I get that, but if I'm going to go double down on say, a cloud, I'm going to go deep, I'm going to hire developers. >> It's interesting, history suggests you have multiple teams remember, we used to have a Unix team or a Sun team inside companies, right? You had a Windows team, you had a kind of a Solaris and Linux team, and there's a Microsoft team, and a non-Microsoft team, in most companies and they didn't really work well together and they had kind of two groups in most companies. I think that was an okay way to get started, but ultimately, to your point, that was not cost effective at all, it was defeating, you see now you had to like have to rethink it, what was my data backup strategy? Okay, I have a Windows backup strategy, and a Unix Solaris backup strategy. So I think we're not going to make the same mistake again, right? I think what will happen, we'll going to have multiple clouds, Amazon, Google, Azure, and then on premise private cloud, so call it, three, four, or five clouds. And then you're going to have a set of tools that can abstract away, not 100% of the clouds, but I think the best developer tools, the best APIs will be multi-cloud. So I can get 80% or 90% of what I want to be done through this developer-led layer of APIs, be it databases or analytics. And then, 10 to 20% of the code, you can write will be able to take care of what's unique to Amazon, what's unique to Azure, what's unique to Google or what's unique to your own private cloud. But I think we're seeing a layer of technology and that's true to all the startups. With back and true to all the startups I see that lets you get most of the way done with a single platform, seamlessly AI technologies, and that's what customers want, right? They don't want to create modal fiefdoms, they want-- >> They want choice. The want choice, but the reality is they don't always get it. I want to go through a throwback to 2010 when Paul Maritz, head of the VMware our first CUBE gig, he said, there's a hardened top. Okay, the hardened top was, you don't worry about what's underneath the top, we're just going to focus on top of the stack that was classic kind of, the stack would develop and you'd had standardization. You mentioned you had Windows teams and Unix teams, but also you could argue that, back then you had Cisco and Wellfleet vendors, but you didn't have two teams of routers, you had one standard that ran the remote interoperability, and OSPF routing, or whatever you had going on, so you had some standardization, how do you view that? Because you want some standardization to have the interoperability, the SLAs and the security, at the same time you want to have flexibility, kind of above what may be called a hardened top, is there a hardened top in multi-cloud? >> I'd say hard top doesn't exist in same way. I think back in the day, you had proprietary technologies, operating systems and firmware, right? So windows was closed, a lot of the network operating systems were closed source. Now you can't get away with that. So you have open source technologies today and public APIs. And so the pressure of both one, competition, two, public APIs that people can read, copy, adjust, three, open source, and it's just customer demand not to be locked into a hard top anymore, that's largely going to go away. So I think most of the major vendors success will try to kind of more or less lock you in and keep you stuck on their platform, their technology, and that's fine, right? Every successful company should be able to do that. But I think the ability to lock you in through proprietary software or operating systems, that's not going to happen anymore. I see through cloud and open source, what we've seen is kind of interoperability, and flexibility is the default, if you can't meet those needs, customers will go other ways. There'll be proprietary technologies, proprietary extensions along the way, but 60, 70% of what you want is going to be compatible with most technologies and most clouds. If you're not going to offer choice and freedom to our customers, they'll go elsewhere. If you don't offer a flexible solution, John, someone else will, and the customers will choose a more flexible solution. >> I would agree with you. Outside of latency, which is laws of physics, value is the lock in, if you're creating value, that's really what the customers want, they get to capture that value. Well, Jerry, great to have you on. I love the new setup. We're going to have to make this more of it. We can bring you in on the podcast when we get Zooms over the weekend, maybe put a panel together. Let's get Carl Eschenbach some VMware alarms to come on, give the perspective, what's going on. And I thank you for taking the time and great to see that you're healthy and doing well. Thanks. >> Me too. Thanks, john. Anytime, I love to be on theCUBE, so I look forward to my next trip. >> All right, Jerry Chen, great CUBE alumni, our first interview over nine years ago, he brought that up. That was at the second reinvent, boy has the world changed, and it's only going to accelerate even faster. Everything's changing new bets are being made, decisions have to be evolving quickly and faster. If you're not fast, you will be in the pile of dead companies and not making it. So, Jerry Chen breaking it down as venture capitalist for Greylock. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Of Silicon Valley. It's the Cube, covering Comcast innovation day brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. It's a really cool space right off of Buffet. And they're doing a lot of new technologies here. It's not the only Innovation Center in the country but it's one here in our backyard. And we're excited to be here. Comcast is having a special event talking about really CX, customer experience. They brought together a bunch of super smart people invited us to stop by and we're going to share some of that with you. And we're excited for our very first guest he's Preston Smalley, the VP of product management of Comcast, Preston great to meet you. >> Good to meet you too, Jeff. >> So really cool event today. We talked about a lot of different things about customer experience and really all the applications that are on the front edge that define that customer experience. And you guys are doing a ton of innovation there. >> No, we are I mean I think it's, we were talking just this morning about all the different ways that we're trying to meet customers, where they're at and building products really around those needs, right? >> Yes, so I think the one of the ones that doesn't get enough credit not enough conversation is the voice. And I've got the voice remote at home. And it's really fascinating, especially in the context of there's so many places that what I'm looking for might be and I don't really know what the licensing and arrangements are that you guys have set up with Hulu or with Netflix or with HBO or if it's on HBO on demand or HBO live. So to be able to have kind of a single point of reference to just push that button and say, "Stanford football," and have it show up, it's amazing. >> No, it really is and I think you know, the voice remote has been one of those big hits where you know, people always love their TV remote but, you know, a number years back we started exploring, could we put a voice you know, search capability directly into that remote. And I think what's great is people they're really leaning into it. So we're seeing a billion voice commands happening a month, >> Billion? >> A billion, one b. Through the remote and I think it's just become a part of their life. Right? And I think it's everything from the simple to saying NBC into the remote to the more complicated things like Notre Dame football or what's my WiFi password? or whatever the things they might be asking out of their device. >> So curious on the development side was like about features, but what were some of the real hurdles that you guys knew you had to overcome? And what were some of the surprise hurdles that you didn't necessarily anticipate? >> Sure. I mean, I think the ones you knew about were we've got to be able to translate speech to text and you know, there's there's existing infrastructure that allows for that and doing that with high accuracy. But the good news is we actually had a head start in organizing the content. And so we already had dealt with text based searching of all the different TV shows and movies and such. And so we had all that base of knowledge that we could then tap into. We're now at a stage where that kind of covers the basics but we're trying to understand how do you both increase the breadth and depth of the kinds of commands that you will do through the voice remote. And so you mentioned some at the beginning things like being able to search, not just the content that we bring but things like Netflix or Amazon Prime or soon Hulu. And so partnering with those companies, you get all that information in a way that works very well with the voice remote. >> Right and then you even have it bilingual, right? You even have Spanish and English. >> That's right. >> And it can flip it can switch back and forth on the fly. >> That's right, yeah, so we support both those languages, including a combo a mixed mode where in households where you're seeing both Spanish and English be interwoven, it'll actually even work in those contexts. And then recently, we've also introduced Canadian French and so we license our technology to Rogers and video Tron up in Canada. And so we've now introduced that capability as well. >> That's great, So a long time ago we interviewed Domino's and it's when they first introduced app ordering. And at first you think well app ordering but there was all this like second order benefits that Domino's replied in terms of accuracy of the orders and supply chain impact. So I'm curious if there's some, you know, kind of second order benefits that you guys are realizing with voice that maybe you didn't think, you know, what are some of the surprises that have come out of that? >> Well, that's a good, good question. I think in terms of surprises, it's the types of things that people are looking for you now have, you now have the ability to figure out what kinds of things people are interested in which you wouldn't have been able to know in a typical browse setting. So for example, we support now over 150 apps on X1 as far as third party streaming apps but we know the ones that we don't support because people are saying and into the remote, whereas we wouldn't have got that information prior. >> Right. >> And so now we can actually go and try and meet those needs. >> Now ,it's interesting. You talk about meeting people where they are and you know, one of the things that's happening today is people have all these options, right? They can get it through their Comcast service if they're doing that but you know they may want to have a direct relationship with Hulu is one that you picked out or with Netflix or this historical ones, you guys now are enabling an option for those people that choose to directly engage with those content providers and just use Comcast, as an internet provider. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing there. >> Yeah, sure. So obviously, we've had strength in the, in the TV space, and being able to organize and aggregate all that streaming content with your traditional television content. What we've done now is take that investment in X1 and pivot it into a new product this year, we call Xfinity flex. And what that product does is it's a streaming device that should be comfortable for an internet only subscriber that they hook up to their TV. It's 4K, HDR, wireless. And through that device, they're able to aggregate all of that streaming content in one place. So whether it's app content that they may already have an existing subscription from or it's ad supported internet content or maybe they want to buy some more content from us right? And so we'll bundle and sell those subscriptions directly and include that as well. And we've actually been pretty surprised, you know, you take something like Netflix which is highly penetrated in the United States we're pretty surprised how many people are still signing up new as a Netflix subscriber in our service and so by just making it easy and just one click away we found that people are they're opting to do that. >> Right, I'm sure they're happy to hear that in Los Gatos just down the road >> Exactly. No, they're a great partner and either way we're helping them >> Right, right >> They're trying to reach what they call kind of the Netflix nevers people that maybe just hadn't gotten Netflix prior, right? And so we're helping them with that. >> Well, it's really interesting, you know, kind of the you know, kind of TV versus computer you speeding the TV's kind of your passive experience, you're sitting on the couch and you just kind of watching where the computer was more two way and then there was dual screen kind of activity, but you guys are bringing a lot of the stuff that was only available on your pc or your phone now directly into the Comcast experience, you know whether it's YouTube or whatever. So it really it's kind of blurring those lines. But I want to shift gears a little bit about, you know, kind of the role of the internet in homes today, has now expanded beyond entertainment. It's expanded beyond information and IoT now is entering the home probably the biggest one is nested, connected thermostats and connected door bells and ring and you know, we're seeing videos from people's rings all over the place. You guys are sitting again, right in the middle of that ecosystem. So how does IoT and connected devices and thermostats and refrigerators and doorbells impacted the way you guys think about delivering internet into the home? >> Well, I think it's really been a watershed moment for the company, moving from, if you go years back to bringing internet to the wall and making it available in the home to saying look, we've got to actually really control the coverage of that WiFi in the home and make sure that it reaches all the corners of the home but then also providing the control that people want of the devices in there we know that for power users we're seeing today, 20 connected devices on the home network. And I know my house, I'm up to 50, right? And I think what customers don't have and don't want is an IT person directly in their home. They want it to just work naturally and easily. >> Right. >> And so one measurement of success that I know is how often my mother in law gives me a call saying, "Hey, Preston, yeah, this thing's not working in my house." It's got to be really easy and straightforward. >> Right and then just in terms of just being a backhauler and the internet traffic that you guys are hearing because all those connected device or your kids devices, they all want 4k streaming, they're watching movies, you know, come down and watch TV on the big screen, no, no, no, you know, I'm watching it in the room. How does that kind of change the way you guys think about delivering bandwidth cause 4K is a lot more, go to NAB, you're just going to soon be 8K's and 12K's and all kinds of crazy stuff. So your role in actually just delivering bandwidth has changed significantly over the last over a year. >> Absolutely, I mean, there was a stat on bandwidth that surprised me even just to look at it, which is in, in the last 18 years, Comcast has increased bandwidth 17 times. And it's just every, you know, we just keep increasing that because the demand is there, you know, 4K takes, you know, more than your 1080p then did your SD and the more streaming that's happening, it's just, it's requiring more bandwidth, so we're happy to provide that. You know, we now offer one gig internet across all of our homes, we reached 56 million homes, I think it's the most in the United States as far as one gig availability. And so regardless of how much bandwidth you want to take, we're going to bring that to you. And I think recognizing that we also need that coverage in the home and out of the home through Xfinity WiFi hotspots, just trying to bring that there. But you mentioned kids too, I wanted to build on that which is, you know, I'm a parent and being able to control how and where my kids go in the internet is important. And so, you know, being able to put limits, whether it's bed time limits on their devices or we've recently introduced in our testing app base limits. So you could say they can't use Instagram or they can only use it 30 minutes a day. And so being able to have that kind of control puts you in the driver's seat as the parent of kids in the home. >> Preston, I think you're going to be busy for a little while here at the innovations center. >> We are for sure. >> All right, well, thanks for spending a few minutes we could talk all day but we'll have to leave it there. >> All right, thanks Jeff. >> Thanks a lot. He's Preston, I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (distinct music)

(light orchestral music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Cube Conversation here at the Palo Alto studios for theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We're here for some news analysis with Peter Smails, the CMO of Datos.IO D-a-t-o-s dot I-O. Hot new start up with some news. Peter was just here for a thought leader segment with Chris Cummings talking about the industry breakdown. But the news is hot, prior to re:Invent which you will be at? >> Absolutely. >> RecoverX is the product. 2.5, it's a release. So, you've got a point release on your core product. >> Correct. >> Welcome to this conversation. >> Thanks for having me. Yeah, we're excited to share the news. Big day for us. >> All right, so let's get into the hard news. You guys are announcing a point release of the latest product which is your core flagship, RecoverX. >> Correct. >> Love the name. Love the branding of the X in there. It reminds me of the iPhone, so makes me wanna buy one. But you know ... >> We can make that happen, John. >> You guys are the X Factor. So, we've been pretty bullish on what you guys are doing. Obviously, like the positioning. It's cloud. You're taking advantage of the growth in the cloud. What is this new product release? Why? What's the big deal? What's in it for the customer? >> So, I'll start with the news, and then we'll take a small step back and sort of talk about why exactly we're doing what we're doing. So, RecoverX 2.5 is the latest in our flagship RecoverX line. It's a cloud data management platform. And the market that we're going after and the market we're disrupting is the traditional data management space. The proliferation of modern applications-- >> John: Which includes which companies? >> So, the Veritas' of the world, the Commvault's of the world, the Dell EMC's of the world. Anybody that was in the traditional-- >> 20-year-old architected data backup and recovery software. >> You stole my fun fact. (laughs) But very fair point which is that the average age approximately of the leading backup and recovery software products is approximately 20 years. So, a lot's changed in the last 20 years, not the least of which has been this proliferation of modern applications, okay? Which are geo-distributed microservices oriented and the rapid proliferation of multicloud. That disrupts that traditional notion of data management specifically backup and recovery. That's what we're going after with RecoverX. RecoverX 2.5 is the most recent version. News on three fronts. One is on our advanced recovery, and we can double-click into those. But it's essentially all about giving you more data awareness, more granularity to what data you wanna recover and where you wanna put it, which becomes very important in the multicloud world. Number two is what we call data center aware backup and recovery. That's all about supporting geo-distributed application environments, which again, is the new normal in the cloud. And then number three is around enterprise hardening, specifically around security. So, it's all about us increased flexibility and new capabilities for the multicloud environment and continue to enterprise-harden the product. >> Okay, so you guys say significant upgrade. >> Peter: Yep. >> I wanna just look at that. I'm also pretty critical, and you know how I feel on this so don't take it personal, multicloud is not a real deal yet. It's in statement of value that customers are saying-- It's coming! But cloud is here today, regular cloud. So, multicloud ... Well, what is multicloud actually mean? I mean, I can have multiple clouds but I'm not actually moving workloads across clouds, yet. >> I disagree. >> Okay. >> I actually disagree. We have multiple customers. >> All right, debunk that. >> I will debunk that. Number one use case for RecoverX is backup and recovery. But with a twist of the fact that it's for these modern applications running these geo-distributed environments. Which means it's not about backing up my data center, it's about, I need to make a copy of my data but I wanna back it up in the cloud. I'm running my application natively in the cloud, so I want a backup in the cloud. I'm running my application in the cloud but I actually wanna backup from the cloud back to my private cloud. So, that in lies a backup and recovery, and operation recovery use case that involves multicloud. That's number one. Number two use case for RecoverX is what we talk about on data mobility. >> So, you have a different definition of multicloud. >> Sorry, what was your-- Our definition of multicloud is fundamentally a customer using multiple clouds, whether it be a private on-prem GCP, AWS, Oracle, any mix and match. >> I buy that. I buy that. Where I was getting critical of was a workload. >> Okay. >> I have a workload and I'm running it on Amazon. It's been architected for Amazon. Then I also wanna run that same workload on Azure and Google. >> Okay. >> Or Oracle or somewhere else. >> Yep. >> I have to re-engineer it (laughs) to move, and I can't share the data. So, to me what multicloud means, I can run it anywhere. My app anywhere. Backup is a little bit different. You're saying the cloud environments can be multiple environments for your solution. >> That is correct. >> So, you're looking at it from the other perspective. >> Correct. The way we define ourselves is application-centric data management. And what that essentially means is we don't care what the underlying infrastructure is. So, if you look at traditional backup and recovery products they're LUN-based. So, I'm going to backup my storage LUN. Or they're VM-based. And a lot of big companies made a lot of money doing that. The problem is they are no LUN's and VM's in hybrid cloud or multicloud environment. The only thing that's consistent across application, across cloud-environments is the data and the applications that are running. Where we focus is we're 100% application-centric. So, we integrate at the database level. The database is the foundation of any application you create. We integrate there, which makes us agnostic to the underlying infrastructure. We run, just as examples, we have customers running next generation applications on-prem. We have customers running next generation applications on AWS in GCP. Any permutation of the above, and to your point about back to the multicloud we've got organizations doing backup with us but then we also have organizations using us to take copies of their backup data and put them on whatever clouds they want for things like test and refresh. Or performance testing or business analytics. Whatever you might wanna do. >> So, you're pretty flexible. I like that. So, we talked before on other segments, and certainly even this morning about modern stacks. >> Yeah. >> Modern applications. This is the big to-do item for all CXOs and CIOs. I need a modern infrastructure. I need modern applications. I need modern developers. I need modern everything. Hyper, micro, ultra. >> Whatever buzz word you use. >> But you guys in this announcement have a couple key things I wanna just get more explanation on. One, advanced recovery, backup anywhere, recover anywhere, and you said enterprise-grade security is the third thing. >> Yep. >> So, let's just break them down one at a time. Advanced recovery for Datos 2.5, RecoverX 2.5. >> Yep. >> What is advanced recovery? >> It's very specifically about providing high levels of granularity for recovering your data, on two fronts. So, the use case is, again, backup. I need to recover data. But I don't wanna necessarily recover everything. I wanna get smarter about the data I wanna recover. Or it could be for non-operational use cases, which is I wanna spin up a copy of data to run test dev or to do performance testing on. What advanced recovery specifically means is number one, we've introduced the notion of queryble recovery. And what that means is that I can say things like star dot John star. And the results returning from that, because we're application-centric, and we integrated the database, we give you visibility to that. I wanna see everything star dot John star. Or I wanna recover data from a very specific row, in a very specific column. Or I want to mask data that I do not wanna be recovered and I don't want people to see. The implications of that are think about that from a performance standpoint. Now, I only recover the data I need. So, I'm very, very high levels of granularity based upon a query. So, I'm fast from an RTO standpoint. The second part of it is for non-operational requirements I only move the data that is select to that data set. And number three is it helps you with things like GDPR compliance and PII compliance because you can mask data. So, that's query-based recovery. That's number one. The second piece of advanced recovery is what we call incremental recovery. That is granular recovery based upon a time stamp. So, you can get within individual points in time. So, you can get to a very high level of granularity based upon time. So, it's all about visibility. It's your data and getting very granular in a smart way to what you wanna recover. So, if I kind of hear what you're saying, what you're saying is essentially you built in the operational effectiveness of being effective operationally. You know, time to backup recovery, all that good RTO stuff. Restoring stuff operationally >> Peter: Very quickly. >> very fast. >> Peter: In a smart way. >> So, there's a speed game there which is table stakes. But you're real value here is all these compliance nightmares that are coming down the pike, GDPR and others. There's gonna be more. >> Peter: Absolutely. I mean, it could be HIPPA, it could be GDPR, anything that involves-- >> Policy. >> Policies. Anything that requires, we're completely policy-driven. And you can create a policy to mask certain data based upon the criteria you wanna put in. So, it's all about-- >> So you're the best of performance, and you got some tunability. >> And it's all about being data aware. It's all about being data aware. So, that's what advanced recovery is. >> Okay, backup anywhere, recover anywhere. What does that mean? >> So, what that means is the old world of backup and recovery was I had a database running in my data center. And I would say database please take a snapshot of yourself so I can make a copy. The new world of cloud is that these microservices-based modern applications typically run, they're by definition distributed, And in many cases they run distributed across they're geo-distributed. So, what data center aware backup and recovery is, use a perfect example. We have a customer. They're running their eCommerce. So, leading online restaurant reservations company. They're running their eCommerce application on-prem, interestingly enough, but it's based on Cassandra distributed database. Excuse me, MongoDB. Sorry. They're running geo-distributed, sharded MongoDB clusters. Anybody in the traditional backup and recovery their head would explode when you say that. In the modern application world, that's a completely normal use case. They have a data center in the U.S. They have a data center in the U.K. What they want is they wanna be able to do local backup and recovery while maintaining complete global consistency of their data. So again, it's about recovery time ultimately but it's also being data aware and focusing only on the data that you need to backup and recovery. So, it's about performance but then it's also about compliance. It's about governance. That's what data center aware backup is. >> And that's a global phenomenon people are having with the GO. >> Absolutely. Yeah, you could be within country. It could be any number of different things that drive that. We can do it because we're data aware-- >> And that creates complexity for the customer. You guys can take that complexity away >> Correct. >> From the whole global, regional where the data can sit. >> Correct. I'd say two things actually. To give the customers credit, the customers building these apps or actually getting a lot smarter about what they're data is and where they're data is. >> So they expect this feature? >> Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I wouldn't call it table stakes cause we're the only kids on the block that can do it. But this is in direct response to our customers that are building these new apps. I wanna get into some of the environmental and customer drivers in a second. I wanna nail the last segment down. Cause I wanna unpack the whole why is this trend happening? What's the gestation period? What's the main enabler for you? But okay, final point on the significant announcements. My favorite topic enterprise-grade security. What the hell does that mean? First of all, from your standpoint the industry's trying to solve the same thing. Enterprise-grade security, what are you guys providing in this? >> Number one, it's basically security protocol. So, TLS and SSL. This is weed stuff. TLS, SSL, so secure protocol support. It's integration with LDAP. So, if organizations are running, primarily if they're running on-prem and they're running in an LDAP environment, we're support there. And then we've got Kerberos support for Kerberos authentication. So, it's all about just checking the boxes around the different security >> So, this is like in between >> and transport protocol. >> the toes, the details around compliance, identity management. >> Peter: Bingo. >> I mean we just had Centrify's CyberConnect conference, and you're seeing a lot of focus on identity. >> Absolutely. And the reason that that's sort of from a market standpoint the reason that these are very important now is because the applications that we're supporting these are not science experiments. These are eCommerce applications. These are core business applications that mainstream enterprises are running, and they need to be protected and they're bringing the true, classic enterprise security, authentication, authorization requirements to the table. >> Are you guys aligning with those features? Or is there anything significant in that section? >> From an enterprise security standpoint? It's primarily about we provide the support, so we integrate with all of those environments and we can check the boxes. Oh, absolutely TLS. Absolutely, we've got that box checked because-- >> So, you're not competing with other cybersecurity? >> No, this is purely we need to do this. This is part of our enterprise-- >> This is where you partner. >> Peter: Well, no. For these things it's literally just us providing the protocol support. So, LDAP's a good example. We support LDAP. So, we show up and if somebody's using my data management-- >> But you look at the other security solutions as a way to integrate with? >> Yeah. >> Not so much-- >> Absolutely, no. This has nothing to do with the competition. It's just supporting ... I mean Google has their own protocol, you know, security protocols, so we support those. So, does Amazon. >> I really don't want to go into the customer benefits. We'll let the folks go to the Datos website, d-a-t-o-s dot i-o is the website, if you wanna check out all their customer references. I don't wanna kind of drill on that. I kind of wanna really end this segment on the real core issue for me is reading the tea leaves. You guys are different. You're now kind of seeing some traction and some growth. You're a new kind of animal in the zoo, if you will. (Peter laughs) You've got a relevant product. Why is it happening now? And I'm trying to get to understanding Cloud Oss is enabling a lot of stuff. You guys are an effect of that, a data point of what the cloud is enabled as a venture. Everything that you're doing, the value you create is the function of the cloud. >> Yes. >> And how data is moving. Where's this coming from? Is it just recently? Is it a gestation period of a few years? Where did this come from? You mentioned some comparisons like Oracle. >> So, I'll answer that in sort of, we like to use history as our guide. So, I'll answer that both in macro terms, and then I'll answer it in micro terms. From a macro term standpoint, this is being driven by the proliferation of new data sources. It's the easiest way to look at it. So, if you let history be your guide. There was about a seven to eight year proliferation or gap between proliferation of Oracle as the primary traditional relational database data source and the advent of Veritas who really defined themselves as the defacto standard for traditional on-prem data center relational data management. You look at that same model, you'll look at the proliferation of VMware. In the late 90s, about a seven to eight year gestation with the rapid adoption of Veeam. You know the early days a lot of folks laughed at Veeam, like, "Who's gonna backup VMs? People aren't gonna use VMs in the enterprise. Now, you looked at Veeam, great company. They've done some really tremendous things carving out much more than a niche providing backup and recovery and availability in a VM-based environment. The exact same thing is happening now. If you go back six to seven years from now, you had the early adoption of the MongoDBs, the Cassandras, the Couches. More recently you've got a much faster acceleration around the DynamoDBs and the cloud databases. We're riding that same wave to support that. >> This is a side effect of the enabling of the growth of cloud. >> Yes. >> So, similar to what you did in VMware with VMs and database for Oracle you guys are taking it to the next level. >> These new data sources are completely driven by the fact that the cloud is enabling this completely distributed, far more agile, far more dynamic, far less expensive application deployment model, and a new way of providing data management is required. That's what we do. >> Yeah, I mean it's a function of maturity, one. As Jeff Rickard, General Manager of theCube, always says, when the industry moves to it's next point of failure, in this case failure is problem and you solve. So, the headaches that come from the awesomeness of the growth. >> Absolutely. And to answer that micro-wise briefly. So, that was the macro. The micro is the proliferation of, the movement from monolithic apps to microservices-based app, it's happening. And the cloud is what's enabling them. The move from traditional on-prem to hybrid cloud is absolutely happening. That's by definition the cloud. The third piece which is cloud-centric is the world's moving from a scale up world to an elastic-compute, elastic storage model. We call that the modern IT stack. Traditional backup and recovery, traditional data management doesn't work in the new modern IT stack. That's the market we're planning. That's the market we're disrupting is all that traditional stuff moving to the modern IT stack. >> Okay, Datos IO announcing a 2.5 release of RecoverX, their flagship product, their start up growing out of Los Gatos. Peter Smails here, the CMO. Where ya gonna be next? What's going on-- I know we're gonna see you re:Invent in a week in a half. >> Absolutely. So, we've got two stops. Well, actually the next stop on the tour is re:Invent. So, absolutely looking forward to being back on theCUBE at re:Invent. >> And the company feels good about those things are good. You've got good money in the bank. You're growing. >> We feel fantastic. It's fascinating to watch as things develop. The conversations we have now versus even six months ago. It's sort of the tipping point of people get it. You sort of explain, "Oh, yeah it's data management from modern applications. Are you deploying modern applications?" Absolutely. >> Share one example to end this segment on what you hear over and over again from customers that illuminates what you guys are about as a company, the DNA, the value preposition, and their impact on results and value for customers. >> So, I'll use a case study as an example. You know, we're the world's largest home improvement retailers. Old way, was they ran their multi-billion dollar eCommerce infrastructure. Running on IBM Db2 database. Running in their on-prem data center. They've moved their world. They're now running, they've re-architected their application. It's now completely microservices-based running on Cassandra, deployed 100% in Google cloud platform. And they did that because they wanted to be more agile. They wanted to be more flexible. It's a far more cost effective deployment model. They are all in on the cloud. And they needed a next generation backup and recovery data protection, data management solution which is exactly what we do. So, that's the value. Backup's not a new problem. People need to protect data and they need to be able to take better advantage of the data. >> All right, so here's the final, final question. I'm a customer watching this video. Bottom line maybe, I'm kind of hearing all this stuff. When do I call you? What are the signals? What are the little smoke signals I see in my organization burning? When do I need to call you guys, Datos? >> You should call Datos IO anytime, if you're doing anything with development of modern applications, number one. If you're doing anything with hybrid cloud you should call us. Because you're gonna need to reevaluate your overall data management strategy it's that simple. >> All right, Peter Smails, the CMO of Datos, one of the hot companies here in Silicon Valley, out of Los Gatos, California. Of course, we're in Palo Alto at theCube Studios. I'm John Furrier. This is theCUBE conversation. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

(uplifting music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE Conversations here at the Palo Alto Studios for theCUBE. I'm John Furrier the co-host of theCUBE, co-founder of SiliconANGLE. We're here for Thought Leader Thursday, and my guest here to talk about the cloud, earnings in the industry, and also all the mega trends happening is Tarun Thakur, who is the co-founder and CEO of Datos.IO, hot start up out of Los Gatos, California. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you, John, thank you, good to be back. >> We love having entrepreneurs come in because you guys are on the cutting edge, you're sweating bullets, you're stressing out, you're building the company. You guys are still in a growth mode, which is great, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> But you're also playing in the cloud game. You're in the ecosystem. We're seeing massive visibility now into the numbers. You see the cloud earnings just came out. Amazon continues to crush it. Microsoft, they're bundling 365 and they're juicing the numbers up but we all know what's going on there, but still, they're looking good. >> Correct. >> And then Google's a dark horse with really that developer platform looking good. So the big three are popping. But, you know, Facebook just announced a $10 billion quarter. They're a cloud too, not to be reckoned with, but kind of not in the pure infrastructures of service. So clearly the market has shown that there is some stability. We're in the second, third inning maybe of this cloud game. What's your take on the marketplace? >> No, I think this is an excellent topic. Thank you, John, for again having us back. Always great to be here. So, you know, the way I think about what's happening really in the cloud is really from three dimensions. Number one, you know, you rightly said $20 billion is what Amazon is on a run rate business of. We personally believe it's still the first innings. It's not the second or the third. You know, they've seen a massive adoption as its called the product market for developilabilty, where the developers, where the application developers, where the SMBs of the world, but the enterprises are just starting to scratch the surface of the cloud. We believe the cloud is in the first innings. The real growth. >> Enterprise cloud. >> Enterprise cloud is just beginning. Just beginning, right. I was, you know, I'll give you quickly an example. I was out in Denver visiting a customer, which is the world's largest, one of the world's largest, shipping companies. They are moving as fast as possible to the cloud, but this is their first foray. But their first foray is not five terabytes or 50 terabytes. Their first foray is 50 petabytes of data. >> So they're moving big time. >> Oh, they're moving big time. >> This is not a toe in the water. >> No, they took two years to evaluate it, and then they go big. >> Right, so talk about the trends here because let's tease through the numbers. I looked at all the earnings, and again, Microsoft is doing well, but remember, they're bundling Office 365, which kind of puts Google unnoticed because Google's got a huge presence that they could roll in. So there's a lot of number games going on that the analysts are kind of pointing out, and we're pointing out, but Amazon has just been crushing it on overall performance. >> Right. >> I mean look at the compute that's going on, the scale, they've got thousands of enterprise customers, and still there's a lot more growth there because the on-prem, true private cloud, is still growing. >> That's correct. >> So what is the state of the enterprise now, and who is using the public cloud more, and who's using it less, and why are they doing that? Is it a makeup, is it a DNA culture? Is it just evolution? >> No, it's just evolution, John. I think the enterprises are finally latching on to this, I think they are, but they're latching on it in a big way. Right, and so that's the second point that I sort of wanted to highlight that while you call Google the Trojan horse, and Amazon being the lead, and then Microsoft somewhere in the middle, let's not forget about Oracle cloud. Larry Ellison is a formidable competitive spirit. He's not going to give up. He has not given up so far. They are going to build an Oracle cloud. There will be a-- >> Well they have an Oracle cloud. >> They have an Oracle cloud. But, you know, having versus really truly-- >> It's so funny, Larry Ellison called Salesforce a fake cloud, but a lot of people are calling Oracle a fake cloud. >> A fake cloud. >> But Oracle on Oracle, we've entered Dave Donatelli, Larry is the only one that hasn't come on theCUBE. Oracle cloud works great with Oracle. >> Correct. >> They're trying to put the message out there that Oracle is working well with cloud native. They're in the Cloud Native Foundation now. >> Sure, sure. >> CNCF, so you stayed in Oracle amidst Avery and folks over there doing a great job, so, but they're not getting the word out. Oracle's not getting the job done because no one sees Oracle as a cool cloud native company. >> No, and they're not. And I think that's a very valid point. But what I'm saying is that there will be room There is oxygen in this market to get the fourth and the fifth cloud provider. There will be specialized clouds. And there will be places for that. Because Amazon is not an answer for all. It is definitely an answer for majority of your workloads, but the HPC, the high performance computing workloads, the GPU workloads, the Oracle. You know, you look at the number one database in the cloud that Amazon claims openly is MySQL. It's not Oracle. An Amazon database business, if they're making 20 billion in total AWS, I will tell you about 40% or 50% of their business is database. And that's not Oracle. So think of five to $10 billion of revenue and money that Amazon is making is not Oracle. >> What's that mean? Does that mean Oracle's losing money or. That's leakage on Oracle's model? Is that Oracle still has an opportunity? Cause they still control a lot of databases. >> Thank you and, thus, thank you, thank you for asking that. It's not that Oracle is losing money, it's the next generation applications, it's the cloud enabled applications. >> So it's growth, it's pure growth. >> It's the new oxygen, it's the new wealth creation. >> So it's like the classic example when the internet started. Web traffic increased because more people were using the internet. >> Correct. >> So what you're saying is that cloud has created a more database market. Amazon's getting a big chuck of it there, but Oracle still has the database market. >> For example if you look-- >> And SAP too. >> And look at the third reason of these clouds, if you look at AIML, right, these applications, the Alexa, the Siri-like applications, and the applications that will be built on top of this, will be built in the cloud. You're not going to start building Alexa AI application on prem infrastructure. That is not happening. And that's the third part of this whole cloud. We say it's $20 billion and we have barely scratched the surface on AI, ML, and blockchain. And all those applications that will be built, will be built on cloud elastic infrastructure. >> Alright, so what's your take? I mean, right now Amazon's winning the cloud game, Oracle, I wouldn't call them number four, but they're trying to juice the numbers up as well, but they clearly have an installed base, and they're not going anywhere. >> Tarun: Captive audience. >> SAP is going multi-cloud, so you're seeing SAP starting to put their, looking at saying, hey, we want our customers to run Oracle SAP on any cloud, so they're clearly thinking multi-cloud. Who else is out there? Alibaba cloud is now coming to the US in San Mateo, so they're number seven cloud but four worldwide, right? >> Tarun: Correct. >> So, pure worldwide numbers, Alibaba's four. >> Yes, so I'll start with Ali cloud. You know, you talk about Alibaba, their cloud is called Ali cloud, and fortunately, as you're building a company, as you talked about earlier on in our offline conversation, you get to meet all the way from governed DoD's and DIA's of the world too. We worked with Ali cloud executive team just a few weeks ago and they were out here in the bay area. Didi is the de facto car hailing company, it's not Uber, in China. We believe Ali cloud will be that in China. There will be a fifth cloud, there will be a sixth cloud. To my point, there will be specialized clouds. Amazon's not going to win this entire pie. And there will be clouds outside of US markets. >> Well I had a chance to tell Karen Lu and Dr. Min Wen Li as well as Dr. Wong at Alibaba in China a few weeks ago, and if you look at what they're doing in China, it's not just cloud. They've got eCommerce, they've got the city brain project. They're looking at holistically around data. Data's fundamental to their vision. I think that's consistent with what we're seeing in the US. A little bit more broader scope because IT here is a little bit more, has more legacy. China's got much more focus and got some government controls in there to get some latitude to do the right things. But the consumers are moving faster in China. If you look at the mobile growth. >> Absolutely. >> John: Huge indicator. >> Look at the Didi's growth. Didi's growth is more faster than Uber's growth. Right, and they've built a massive, massive company out there. >> IoT is pretty hot in China, you're starting to see that. I mean, this is a re-imagining of cloud, so you guys are in the middle of it with back on the road recovery. So as a CEO you're in the body swerving, car's that are flying by you, you're trying not to get run over. You've got a good market opportunity with the cloud because GDPR's coming right around the corner. >> Yes, yes, absolutely. >> So what's your strategy? Are you, I mean, I'm paraphrasing, not dodging cars, but, I mean, as a start up you've got to worry about your success might kill you, but how do you manage the business? I mean, how are you looking at this? Because you've got a great opportunity, and it's a growth market. >> Thank you, thank you. No we're lucky and fortunate that some of the decisions we made back four years ago people used to laugh, why are you going in this market of cloud data applications and isn't eight out of $10 dollars being spent on Oracle. Why would you go off to that. And, we're like, guys that's today. Where the puck is going. The puck is going towards the cloud and cloud applications. And to answer your question, we've found beautiful beautiful excellent product market fit. A little bit about the company. >> John: What's the use case? >> We're just classically going backup in recovery use cases. Built for cloud native applications. So, for example, I talked about the number one database in the cloud is MySQL. The number two database on prem is SQL Server. Take a guess on number two database in the cloud. It's MongoDB, they just went IPO two weeks ago. Number two database on Amazon is MongoDB. Who thought that five years ago? >> Well Lamp Stack its just open stores driving a lot of this action. >> So, I'll give you an example, one of our biggest, biggest customers which we're going to be announcing very soon, but take the liberty to share here, OpenTable. OpenTable, we are protecting OpenTable. 2.5 billion documents. That's yours and my reservation. That's your and my reservation that we make for a beautiful restaurant. >> Yeah, and if I change that reservation I've got to have that backed up, but want to bring it back. You guys are doing that. So what's the scale of the OpenTable? Ballpark it. >> So all their entire reservation applications. >> The whole thing. >> I probably will not talk about the datasets. You know, but their entire geo-distributed applications. You could be sitting in New York or you could be in London. >> And in which cloud are they using? >> They are all Google cloud, they're on prem. So they're truly private cloud and public cloud. So I call that a multi cloud data management space. They've a ton of stuff still on prem. They're not going to diverge away from that very quickly. >> What's the Google situation? Sam Ramji is over there doing a great job. Google Next is coming up soon, next year. Great traction, but still people aren't considering Google as the white glove service because, well, Amazon's not really known for that either, but at least they have a lot more, thousands more customers than Google does. >> Yeah so I think that the problem is twofold, in my humble opinion. Or the observation is twofold. One, I think Google needs to amp up their game around cloud and cloud messaging. You open Amazon AWS.cloud website, and you open GCP website, you could just see the differences. How Amazon talks about cloud. You're still selling compute storage network, but they talk business agility. What took a month for SQL Server now takes two hours. That's what you're selling, right? >> You're selling speed and you're selling automation, and you're selling value. >> Orchestration. So I think Google has to amp up their game, and amp up their game around that. >> Are they too technical, too geeky? >> Too nerdy, too geeky and still talking about infrastructure. >> Yeah sure, and I think Sam knows that too. >> And I think second part, which is, you know, they absolutely need to amp up their game not go head on and follow Amazon, find the newer applications and new use cases, where they can go ahead of Amazon. Whenever you're playing Art of War, either you can follow somebody or you go establish your own base. >> If they go frontal attack on these guys they'll lose, they've got to play the shadows. I think they can slingshot around them. I think the developer traction they have is strong, even though Amazon's got strong developer traction. Google's got some goodness with TensorFlow, they've got some great technology, but they've got to stop the game of we're Google, go with us. Enterprises don't work that way even though I get why they say that cause it's true. At some level from a alpha geek perspective, but this isn't the land of alpha geeks, these are real people that have jobs and enterprise IT that won't transform. >> They're real enterprises, who have real DBAs, and real server admins who really care about data services. Going back to the comment-- >> Not just the shiny new toy. I need reliability, proof. >> I want durability of this data. Don't just tell me I can get compute 10 times cheaper than Amazon. That's not what I care about. Change my, talk my language. I care about data services. I called data driven enterprises. >> Okay, as you guys go out and talk to customers, give me the anecdotal view of the landscape of customers. Because obviously the earnings came out. We saw, again, Amazon continuing to do well. But they've got some competition. We just laid and unpacked that. Customers now see this. What's kind of the the conversations in the boardrooms, and then in the trenches in IT and enterprise as they transform because IT is not a department anymore in the future enterprise. It's now a fabric of all things in cloud native. What are the conversations? Are they slowing down, obviously they want to go faster, is it a personnel issue? What are some of the conversations? >> I'll give you real example. We presented recently to a big, massive federal government agency. We cannot take their name out of legal. >> John: They spend a lot of money. >> Out of Washington, D.C. out here in the Bay area. >> CIA. Or, NSA. >> You're looking at the start-ups in the Bay area, and they were like, look why had we ever adopted the IBMs, the mainframes, and the EMCs, and the Dells of the world. We also know the wealth of the innovation is here in Silicon Valley. Right, so they come out once a year. And I can tell you, John, spending two hours that we did with them earlier in the week, and they are accelerating their journey to the cloud. Things that were foreign terms like micro services, that's how they want to build these federal agencies now. Every application has to have microservices. They are not truly there. I'll tell you that. They are not there, but that is top of mind for the CIA. >> And gov cloud has grown very fast, fedramp, all these services. >> Amazon called it Commercial Cloud Service, c2s, built for the government. And that entire team was here. >> Well Tarun great job. Congratulations on your opportunity we just talked about. Datos.IO. You guys, it's Datos.IO if you want to check out the website. You're going to be at Reinvent, you're going to come on theCUBE, we'll be there with two sets. Again, I have 50, you're doing Amazon, love the community there, they do a great job, Andy Jassy comes on, great group, Trace Carlson, among others. What are you expecting to see this year at Amazon? Besides the fact that it's going to be crowded and certainly the show of the year in terms of cloud. >> Momentum, they're going to accelerate the momentum. The amount of services they're planning to announce from, because we work with the team very closely, and the amount of acceleration they're showing, the new partners coming on board, and the partners like us who had one customer, and now we have 20 in Amazon cloud. You know, we just became an advanced technology partner, they understand that. >> So you're happy with how they're working with partners? >> Oh we love Amazon team. We became an advanced technology partner. They drilled us down for three months to prove themselves, yes, Datos can run on their infrastructure. You know, they want to go fast, but they want to go diligent fast. >> Yeah, we love Amazon too, of course. Our crowd chat solver's on their website as a case study using some of their stuff. Thanks so much for coming on, your final thoughts. Earnings, cloud, where are we? >> This is unstoppable force. It's an unstoppable force, we're in the first innings. There's so much opportunity ahead of us. And we couldn't have picked a beautiful market to than what we did. >> And true private cloud as we keep pointing out, turns out that's playing out. On prem activity's high. Your thoughts on on prem? True private cloud? >> It's going to survive, it's going to survive. But it's not going to be the growth place. >> But we think it will grow with the SaaS. >> With the Saas, I agree, but infrastructure. Infrastructure is not going to be growing. So that's our two cents, but you know, we'll be back in a couple of weeks, we have a phenomenal exciting product launch coming up. >> I just tweeted on Twitter this morning $1.5 billion is going to be coming out of on premise, non-differentiated labor operations. Which basically means, the rack and stacking some of these jobs are going to go away. But the growth is in automation, AI, and machine learning, and some SaaS tooling. >> Cloud applications. >> Cloud operations business models growing on premise. >> And those dollars are going to leak to the cloud. >> Yeah, and cloud, it's all to the cloud. Tarun, thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> Co-founder and CEO of Datos.IO. I'm John Furrier here for CUBE Conversation in Palo Alto at our studios, thanks for watching. (techno music)