(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicone Valley Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation here at our Palo Alto CUBE studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great conversation here with Matt Cain, CEO of Couchbase. Matt, welcome to theCUBE. >> John, thanks for having me here. >> So it's great to have you on because we've been following Couchbase really from the beginning but in 2011 that was the big movement with Couchbase and Membase coming together. Since then quite a tear. Couple of things, one from a business standpoint, good mix of you guys. And then you've got the cloud trend just absolute change the game with scale. So enterprise is now a reeling, cloud is there, the roll of data's changed. Now data's now a part of everything. This has been a big part of the successful companies in this next cloud 2.0 or this next shift. Give us an update on Couchbase. What's going on with the company? You've been the CEO for a couple of years, what's new? >> Yeah, so I'm 2 1/2 years in, John. It's been a great ride so far. Let's talk a little bit about how successful the company is and then we'll spend some time on the market. We just finished the first half of our fiscal year and the business is on a phenomenal trajectory. We're up 70% year on year. Average contract values up 50%. Total contract value up over 100%. We now call 30% of the Fortune 100 customers. So in terms of business success we're really proud of what we're able to do and the problems that we're solving for our customers. The backdrop, and what we're so excited about is the market transition that we're participating in. And it's our belief at Couchbase that the world of databases represents the single biggest market transition that's going to occur in technology over the next couple years. And I think there are two fundamental drivers behind that transition which you talked about. One of them is a technology disruption and the other is business disruption. On the business side we believe deeply in digital transformation or the fourth industrial revolution. And we spend our time going around the world talking to enterprise customers and everyone of 'em is figuring out how to use technology to get closer to their customers and change their business. In order to do that they need to build next generation applications that change our customer experience as both professionals and our personal lives. To enable that though, you need a completely different approach to the database. And how you manage the underlying data to enable those experiences and Couchbase sits at the intersection of those two transitions. >> Want to get into some of the database software dynamics from being a software company, a database company. You guys are, you're on a good wave, you've got a good surfboard as we say in California. But the couple of things I want to get your thoughts on, you see the database market like the oracles of the world. The database that rules the world, that's changed. Now there's multiple databases out there. Different needs for different workloads. And then you've got open-source. So you've got the two things going on I want to get your reaction to. One is the changing landscape of the database market. And two, the impact of open-source because both have been changing and growing and evolving. What's your reaction to those two dynamics? >> So let's talk databases first. I think to reflect on databases one needs to think about the applications that those databases have been architected to support. And if you look at legacy solutions, legacy systems, it was really built on relational technology. And the applications those were optimized for and have been really running for the last many decades were big monolithic applications. And I like to say the implementation of one of those at a large financial firm in New York probably wasn't much different than a consumer company in Seattle. That is changing now in the world of microservices and customer experiences and applications demand a different type of database. And so as we think about what is an application literally everything that we do between the human world and the digital world goes via an application. Whether it's our, you know, checking our banking statements, how we engage with our health care provider, how we travel, how we buy things, whether we're in a store or we're doing it from the comfort of our home. Everything is via an application and what we've come to expect is I want that application to work my way which is different than your way. Well that's a very different thing than legacy applications that were built for CRM or ERP and so databases are going through this big transformation because of that business transition that I talked about where we as consumer are demanding different ways of engaging. And if you look at enterprise success in digital transformation it's very tied to the experiences that they're creating which necessitate a database that is capable of handling those. So we're seeing a massive shift in database technologies or proliferation of new companies that are supporting next generation applications. With respect to open-source, when I talk to enterprises they want the flexibility of a new way of acquiring technology. And people are very used to, "I want to examine things "in the way I want to learn about it. "And I want to play with technology "to make sure that it's going to meet my needs." In the case of databases, does it have the scale and performance? Does it have the usability? And so as an open-source company we want to enable our application developers, our enterprise architects, our dev-ops teams to use the technology and see what's it like. And I think enterprises really appreciate that model. So I think open-source is not only unique to databases, it's how enterprises want to-- >> And certainly is growing and changing as well. So you mentioned open-source and databases. I want to get your thoughts on the cloud impact because if you look at the success of Amazon which I call them the leaders and they won the cloud 1.0 game, or the first inning, or the first game of the double header as some say. APIs led itself well to decoupling and creating highly cohesive workloads. Using APIs and (mumbles). There you got to store data in the databases. You might have one workload with one database and another workload using other databases. So have you have a diverse database landscape. >> For sure. >> So that's kind of out there. So if that's the case how do I as an enterprise deal with this because now I'm thinking, "Okay, I want to stitch it all together. "I got to maintain security. "Now I'm dealing with multiple clouds." It's become a discussion and design point for dealing with all these new dimensions. What's the mind of the customer in all this? >> Yeah, and on top of that I want to do it without dramatically increasing my total cost of ownership. And so I talk a lot to enterprises that represent that very challenge. What they say is I have to change the customer experience. In order to do that I need to understand who they are. What are their preferences? What inventory do I have as an organization? What do I have in physical locations? What we talk about is different data silos. And the reality is data has been in those silos for a long time and in some cases it's not coming out anytime soon. So one of the new approaches with data platforms is how do I take advantage of existing investment and infrastructure and layer in new technology platforms that can sit between the application and the legacy systems? And then you can suck that data into a data store that is helping feed the applications on a real time basis whether that's in the cloud or out to the edge. And Couchbase is one of the examples of a database that can handle that but can handle it at scale unlike any other company on the planet. So when we talk to customers it's how do you extract all that different information which has rich potential if they application logic can present it in a way that's customized but do that in a way that's constantly on, available from anywhere in the network topology and reliable. So it is a challenge and it's one of the greatest computer science challenges in the enterprise right now. >> On that point I want to ask you, what's the number one story or trend that people should be paying attention to? >> Yeah, so you asked a question on cloud, which I think is fundamental, and enterprise is like pay as you go models and utilization based economics which make complete sense. A lot of the architecture therefor is being driven in a centralized manor. So bring information into centralized cloud take advantage of bundling effects. I believe that one of the best kept secrets if you will or biggest trends that people aren't spending as much time on is edge. If you think about us in this studio right now there isn't a cloud sitting behind us and yet you're working on your machine, I was on my device a moment ago and I'm expecting real time information across all my applications. We are constantly manipulating, moving, accessing data and we expect to be able to do that at all times. Well in order to do that at the scale in which we're talking you have to have database technology at the edge. And by definition if you're expecting a roundtrip of data processing, which you're potentially doing, is increasing latency. And that's if you have a reliable connection. If you don't have a reliable connection you're dead in the water with it with that application. So if you think about the future of healthcare, if you think about next generation retail, if you think about connected homes and connected cars, the reality is we're going to expect massive processing of data out at the edge. And I think data platform companies have to be mindful of what they're architecting for. Now Couchbase is uniquely positioned in NoSQL databases that we can run in any public cloud and we can run that same platform out to the edge and orchestrate the movement of applications and data between every point of the network topology. And that's when our enterprises say, "Wow, this is game changing technology "that allows me to serve my customers "the way they want to be served." >> Most people might not know this about you, and I'm going to put you on the spot here, is that you had almost a 10 year run at Cisco. >> Yeah, that's right. >> From the 2000 timeframe. Those were the years that Cisco was cutting its teeth into going from running the internet routes to building application layers and staring see... And the debate at that time was should Cisco move up the stack. I'm sure you were involved in a lot of those conversations. They never did and they're kind of staying in their swim lane. But the network is the network and we're in a distributed network with the cloud, so the question is what is the edge now? So is the edge just the network edge? Is it the persons body? Is it the wearable? How do you guys define the edge? >> I think the edge is constantly being pushed further and further, right? One of the things that we talk a lot about is mobile devices, right? If we think about the device that we as humans ultimately touch at the end where we're not dependent on sensors and things, it is our mobile devices and we all know the impact that's had. I'd be willing to bet you that cup of coffee that you have Couchbase database running in your mobile device because we can actually embed it inside the application and allow the application architect to determine how much data you want to use. But the way we've architected things is we think for the future. This isn't just mobile devices, this is the ability to put things directly into sensors. And if we think about how applications are working the amount of data that you can draw with machine learning algorithms, which we've enabled in our latest release, imagine a world where we're embedding a database instance inside of a sensor. So companies aren't quite there today, but we're not that far off where that's going to be the case. >> Well I bring up the Cisco example because you obviously at that time the challenge was moving packets around from point A to point B. You mentioned storage, you store things from here to there. Move packets around in point A to point B. That's the general construct. But when we think about data they're not packets you're talking about sometimes megabytes and betabytes of data. So the general theme is don't move data around the network. How does that impact your business? How does that impact a customer? Because okay they maybe have campuses or wide area networks or SD-WAN, whatever they got. They still want a instrument, they still want to run compute at the edge, but moving the data around has become persona non gratae in **. So how do people get around that? What's the design point? >> So you and I remember these examples when we use to go into conference rooms and ask for ethernet cables, right? The days of what is my wifi connectivity weren't there yet. If we think about that philosophical challenge that was I'm used to a certain experience with connectivity, how do I enable that same connectivity and performance as I get further and further away from the central topology? And so what we did at Cisco is put more and more sophistication into branch routing and make sure that we had reliability and performance between all points of the topology. The reality is if you were to take that same design approach to databases, what you end up with is that centralized cloud model which a lot of companies have chosen. The problem with it occurs when you're running truly business critical applications that demand real-time performance and processing of massive applications. And so-- >> Like what, retail? >> Yeah. So at Couchbase what we've decided to do is take the data logic where the data resides. So we actually now call four of the top 10 retailers in the world customers. And what they are doing is changing our experience as consumers. Omnichannel. When I walk into a store, imagine if you're at a do-it-yourself retailer, somethings popped off the back of your washing machine and you say, "I don't know how old the washing machine is. "I don't know what the part is." Go into one of these mega stores that we know, with the application now via Couchbase in a mobile phone I could take a picture of that. With machine learning algorithms I'm now running technology to say, "Do I have this in inventory?" "What is it compatible with?" "Oh, and it happens to be on aisle 5." Or, "We don't have it and we're going to ship it out." I mean that's game-changing stuff. Well to enable that use case I need to understand who you are. I need to know what you've bought before. I need to understand our product catalog, what things are compatible with. You're literally storing, in that case, three or four billion instances in a data store that you need to access on a real-time basis. >> In milliseconds. >> In less than 2 1/2 second millisecond response rates. To make the challenge even more exciting, those customers come to us and they say, "Well what if there's a hurricane?" "What if there is no internet connectivity?" "What if I don't have a cellular connection?" I still want my users to have a great customer experience. Well now all of a sudden that isn't an extension of a cloud, that becomes it's own cloud. Now to orchestrate the movement of information and applications from that point and have consistency across all your other stores, you need to figure out orchestrating applications, orchestrating massive amounts of data, having consistency. And so the way to do it, bring the data logic where the data resides and then really understand how applications want to move things around. >> So first of all, my database antenna goes up. The comparison of the old days was you had to go to a database, run packets across the network, access the database, do a lookup, send it back and then go back again. >> Right, right. And that's not possible. That's interesting modern approach. But you also mentioned all that complexity that's involved in that. Okay, no power or no connectivity you have to have an almost a private cloud instance right there. I mean this is complex. >> Very complex. >> And this is some of the kinds of things we saw with the recent Jedi proposal that Amazon and Microsoft fought over. Microsoft won to deal with the battle fields. All this complexity where there's no bandwidth, you got to have the data stored locally, it's got to use the back hall properly. So there's a lot of things going on in the system. There's a lot to keep track of. How do you guys manage that from a product standpoint because there's somethings are out of your control. >> Yeah. >> How does Couchbase make that scale work? >> So that's a great question. Let me again complete the problem statement which is databases need to account for all that complexity but application developers and dev-ops teams don't want to deal with the specifics of a database. And so when we're selling into enterprises at this magnitude we need to be very relevant to application developers where they want speed and agility and familiarity of tools they know and yet we need to have the robustness and completeness of a platform that can literally run business critical applications. And so part of the power of Couchbase is that we engineer with extreme elegance, that we put a lot of that sophistication into the database and our job is to write the code that manages that complexity. But what we also do is we go to enterprise and we say we give you the full power of this NoSQL engine that is in memory, shared nothing, scale out, highest performance on the planet but we allow you all the power and familiarity of the language you know which is SQL. You've got this, I'm sure back to your database education you were familiar with, SQLs a programing language, well there's an entire world of database people and architects that understand that as an interface. So how do I account for that complexity but then go to you and say, "You know that language "that you've been speaking the whole time "talking to your old database? "Well you can speak with that same language "on your new database." And that's how you can really break through enabling customers to modernize their applications with all this complexity but do so in a way that they're comfortable with and is aligned to the skills that they-- >> So you extract away the interface, or language NoSQL I know there are others and modernize onto the covers? >> Correct. >> And at scale? >> At the highest scale. >> All right, I got to ask you about multi-cloud because multi-cloud is something that we were talking before we came on camera around cloud sprawl, inheriting clouds, M&A. Companies have multiple clouds they're dealing with but no one's, well my opinion, no one's architecting to build the best multi-cloud system. They're dealing with multi-clouds and design point which you mentioned which is interesting. I want to get your thoughts on this because you're hearing a lot of multi-cloud buzz. And it's a reality but it's also a challenge for application developers. And I want to get your thoughts on this. How should people thinking about multi-cloud in your opinion? >> Yeah, so my perspective starts with what we hear from our customers. And our customers say for truly business critical applications that they are running their business on, whether it's core booking engines, customer platforms, the touchpoint between users and stores, they say, "Look, I need to design a system "that's reliable and higher performing "and public cloud is a reality. "At the same time I have legacy data center on-prem, "I've got things out at the edge," and so they have to architect a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and distributed environment. And so depending on the layer of the stack that you're in I think the cloud companies would talk about their multi-cloud strategy. I come at it a different way which is how do we build a data platform that supports the applications that demand a hybrid multi-cloud environment? And so when we have a certain application that's running on-prem, how do we alive for a reliable failover instance to be running in a public cloud? To me that is truly fulfilling on the demands that enterprises have. And so I think multi-cloud is a strategy of all enterprises. Giving the flexibility with things like Kubernetes to avoid cloud lock in. Making sure your system can handle migration of workloads and active, active, active, passive scenario. I think that's our approach to multi-cloud. >> It's interesting, again back to this Jedi thing which was front and center in the news. Kind of speaks to the modern era of what the needs are. The Department of Defense has a multi-cloud strategy, they have multiple clouds, and well turns out Microsoft might be the sole source. But their idea was it's okay to have a sole source cloud for a workload but still deal within a multi-cloud framework. What's your thoughts on this? Some people are saying, "Hey, if you've got a workload "that runs great on cloud, do it." >> Yeah. I don't want to make that decision for the enterprise, I want them to determine what the best instance is based on the application that they're enabling. So I ask all my enterprise customers, "How many applications do you have in your environment?" Thousands of applications. It would be wrong for me to go dictate and say, "Well I have the answer "for every one of those applications." Instead we want to build a sophisticated platform that says look, if these are the requirements, the performance requirements, run your database in this instance and you determine if that's the best for you. If you have a legacy application that needs an underlying mainframe or relational database, that's fine. We're not asking you to forklift upgrade that. Put the database in there that's going to give you the performance and requirements you want. And so again, it's where do application developers want to stand up their application for the best performance? I'll tell you what, in the 2 1/2 years I've been at Couchbase I've sat down with Fortune 100 CIOs that have absolutely told me, "Here is our cloud strategy "with public cloud vendor number one." Come back two years later and they said, "We have shifted for X, Y, and Z reason "and we are going to public cloud vendor number two." If we had chosen one specific deployment and not given thought to how enterprises are eventually going to want to have that flexibility we would be having a very different conversation. And so when we talk about we're enterprise class, multi-cloud to edge, NoSQL database, it's giving enterprises this flexibility at a database-- >> So on that example of I went with cloud number one and then moved to cloud number two, was that a I'm stopping with cloud one going to cloud two or I'm going to move a little bit to cloud two or both? >> I think it varies depending on the CIO that you're talking to. It could be they didn't handle GDPR the way I wanted to or it could be they're not deployed in a certain geographic reason. It could be-- >> Capabilities issue. >> Capabilities. Could be business relationship. You know, I have a particular commercial relationship over here therefor I have an incentive to move here. Some of 'em have dual strategies, so I think it's very dangerous for companies like us to try to-- >> Beauty's in the eye of the beholder as I always say with cloud. You pick your cloud based on what you're trying to do. Final question, security obviously, cloud security you're seeing. Amazon just had a recent even called re:Inforce which was I think the first cloud security show, RSA, there's a bunch of other shows that go on, they're all different. But security clearly is being baked in everywhere. Kind of like data, kind of horizontally embedded, need real time, you need a lot of complexity involved. They want to make it easier. What's your view on how security is playing out for Couchbase? >> Look, it's a paramount design principle for us. And we think that to build a database for business critical applications you need to have reliability, you need to have performance, you need to have scalability, you have to have security. So it's part of how we think about every component from cloud to edge and everything in between. How do we have encryption? How do we have multi-factor authentication? How do we ensure that not just securing the data itself, but how do we give the operational controls to the database teams to orchestrate the movement of data and synchronize it in a reliable way. So absolutely important to us because it's important to our customers. >> Awesome. Matt Cain, CEO of Couchbase here inside theCUBE for CUBE conversation. Matt, I want to give you a chance to get the plug in for the company. Give the pitch if I'm a customer or prospect. Hey Couchbase I heard a little buzz. You guys got momentum going on, got good references. What's the pitch to me? >> Yeah so look, Couchbase is the only company on the planet that can make the following claim. We bring the best of NoSQL with the power and familiarity of SQL in one elegant solution from the public cloud to the edge. So let me walk through that. Our architecture was enabled for the highest performance in the world. Billions of documents. We have a customer who on a daily basis is running 8 million operations per second with less than two millisecond response time. Their business is running on Couchbase. You can't do that if you have the best data schema, the architecture for scalability, scale out, do that at high total cost of ownership. At the same time we want to bring the familiarity of programing languages that people know so that application developers don't have a big barrier to entry in deploying Couchbase. And that's where we've uniquely enabled the SQL query language for both query's, our operational analytics capability, that combination is extremely powerful. To be able to run in anyone of the public clouds, which we do via the marketplace or customers bring in their own nodes to their instances knowing that that's a changing thing per our conversation. But having a seamless integrated platform where you can run the same query in the public cloud as you can at the edge and then synchronizing that back together, that is a very powerful thing. One elegant platform we have, you know, we're a multi-model database. We can run a key-value cache, we can run a JSON database. We give you advanced querying, we give you indexing. To do that in one integrated platform no one else has thought about that and future proof their solution. Let me give you an example of how that all wraps up. One of the more innovative industries right now believe it or not, are cruise lines. And so we talk about digital transformation which is by definition customer experience. Well if you're in the cruise line business, if you're not creating a great customer experience, it's not like airline travel where you've got to get from point A to point B so you chose the best. This is I'm opting for an experience if this isn't great. so one of the most leading edge cruise lines out there has deployed Couchbase and they give every passenger a wearable. That wearable now fundamentally changes the interface between me as a passenger and the physical boat, the digital services, and the other people on the ship. And this is in a world... It's a floating device. There is no cloud, there is no cellular connections. So let's say we happen to be on the same ship. We end up at sports bar after we drop our family off, maybe we're talking databases, maybe we're talking something else. And we have beer, we have a second beer, what we don't know is that this cruise line is using our device. They know who we are, they know where we are, they're using geospatial technology back in e-commerce. They have a hypothesis that we're now friends, right? Or at least maybe we want to see each other again. Unbeknownst to us the next day we get a promotion that says 50% off at the sports bar for the next game. Wow that's great, I'm going to go. And then I run into you and it's like, "Wow, what are the chances that I run into you?" Well the chances in the old world very slim. The chances in new world very good. If I had little kids the digital content in the cabin is different. If there's a movie getting out how it navigates me around the ship is different. All of this is empowered by massive amounts of data processing, data collection and they've embedded that now in a device. Now if you're in that business and now you've got weeks worth of information on what we like, ship comes back to shore, how do you take all that information, extract it back to a cloud, improve the algorithm, start to offer different shipping option. They're literally changing the physical display of the boats to optimize customer experience. So think about that. Power of processing massive amounts of information in real time. If I'm getting a promotion and it's too late and I miss a game, does me no good. The combination of all those different data silos, right? Doing that where application developers can be agile and swift and make changes in an innovative way and stay ahead of their competition. Cloud to edge. Right? I mean that's literally a ship comes back, it goes to cloud, it enables it in this consistent... We're the only company on the planet that can do that. >> Lot of complexity involved. >> Yeah. >> Awesome. Quick plug. Are you guys hiring? What's going on with the company? What are you looking for? >> As quickly as possible. Based on our conversation earlier and your knowledge of databases, we're looking for quota carriers and engineers. So if you want to come on over we're-- >> I was thinking about the cruise ship and having a couple of beers with you watching some sports. My (mumbles) says >> Sounds like sports-- >> "Hey John's had so many beers "why don't you hit the tables?" >> Sounds like-- >> "We'll take your money." >> Sound like more a rep than an engineer. (both laughing) >> Matt, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Matt Cain, CEO of Couchbase. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)