(light string music) Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation. From our super duper studios, here in beautiful Palo Alto, California. Today we're going to get a chance to talk about database migration and database technology evolution as it pertains to Cloud computing. And to have that conversation, we've got Datometry here. Mike Waas is the CEO and Founder of Datometry. Mike, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. Excited to be here. >> So, let's get the company update out of the way. What's going on with Datometry first? >> All right, well, quickly for everybody. We are a venture-backed startup in San Francisco, and we're taking on, if you will, the database market, this $40 billion behemoth. From a very unique angle. And that is, not yet another database, but we give IT leaders, for the first time, that opportunity to actually liberate themselves from the database vendor lock in. Take their applications the way they are today, written for a particular database, usually one of these legacy data warehouses. Take 'em to the Cloud just the way they are. Without the hassle of rewriting and reinventing their business. >> So, keep the applications that are creating value in place. Move the data and the structure associated with the data, so that it can be re-platformed to a new database manager, but still serve those applications and generate business value through those applications. >> Exactly, because the value really is in the application, not in the database. This is what enterprises have been curating and investing in for the last 10, 20, sometimes even more years. And so for them, going to the Cloud suddenly poses this huge problem of, do I really want to rewrite these applications? Just to end up with something that looks exactly like that in the Cloud now? So we allow them to do this at a fraction of the cost, the time, and the risk. >> So you're on the road talkin' with a lot of customers these days, >> That's right. >> about this challenge. What are you encountering? >> So it's very interesting to see how the Global 2000, and we're speaking primarily to the Global 2000, Fortune 500, are coming around now to really address this problem. And people are on kind of different trajectories and differently far along on this. And so there are a number of enterprises that are ready to pull the trigger. That have maybe another nine, 12 months of a runway on their data center right now. And they are really kind of looking for a tactical solution to get there. It's all or nothing. Very excited. Very great customer to work with. Then there are customers who are kind of still in the process of figuring it out. They know they have a little more of a runway. And they kind of get into the point of, well I understand what workloads probably would work in the Cloud, let's start with those. And so it's great for us to kind of work with these customers to help them understand, which are these workloads? How can you actually come up with a prioritized order of, this goes first, this goes next, and so on and so forth. And then, to some extent, my favorite are the ones that are really in the early stages of the journey. Because for them, it's really about getting kind of a familiarity, getting acquainted with all this. And so for them it's kind of an exploratory phase, it's kind of a lot of research, and trying to understand what they have today, and how it would map to the Cloud. And obviously, as you can imagine, they have a lot of questions in their mind. And so, as a company, we work with all three of these. And our product naturally allows all of them kind of to get a value out of this. At that very moment, right away. Especially without having to wait for two, three years of planning and rewriting and remodeling applications. >> Well let's leave that third group aside. Because one can spend about 20 years just trying to discover what they have. And instead look at the workloads. What types of workloads are candidates today for this type of an approach? Again, keeping the application relatively extant, relatively unchanged. Moving the data, and re-platforming it to a more modern technology. What kinds of workloads are especially open to this approach? >> So, first off, I have good news. And that is, it is way more than you actually would think. And, coming from a database background myself, for the last 20 years, 25 years, implementing databases. We database people have always very much looked at operations at optimizing the last iota out of the machine, et cetera. >> Mm-hmm. >> What we are seeing in the Cloud is really a fundamental change. It's no longer about millisecond parity, but it's about getting your data into the Cloud, and unlocking scalability, performance price performance ratio, the benefit that you get brand new hardware every coupla' months as a refresh. Continuous software updates and improvements. And so all of this suddenly changes the migration from kind of one to one, or one for one, and millisecond parity. To a real quantum leap. From on-premise, into the Cloud is a much different story. >> Well, let me impact that a little bit, because really, if I have a right, what you're saying is that in the old way of thinking about database management, with enormous amounts of tuning, the point was to try to get as much performance out of whatever hardware platform you were running on as you possibly could. Now, when we go to the Cloud, that constraint starts to go away. So we're not focused on getting the last iota of performance out of the hardware, we're focused on getting the last stretch or last stream of value out of the data in the application. Because the hardware constraint no longer obtains in the same way, have I got that right? >> Absolutely, yes. So it's really about IT running faster, figuratively, rather than running a particular workload faster on a piece of metal. And that really changes the equation, fundamentally. Because then, a lot of the workloads, coming back to your previous question, a lot workloads certainly benefit from going to the Cloud. And initially, when we started tackling the problem of data warehousing, I personally thought, it's probably going to be mostly about the analytics, about the downstream consumers of the data. But then very quickly, it turned out that ETL is very often such a, let's call it a complex, very involved process. That moving that wholesale to the Cloud, without having to undo it, and then reinvent it, and rewrite it, is just such a Godsend for the enterprise. And so, back to your original question, it's really workloads across the entire board. >> So, if I were to then think through the process, let's say that I'm a CIO and I'm thinkin' this process through, number one, by not having to focus on like-to-like, I'm changing my thought process. Because historically, it's been, oh, you can't move that database manager, because you're focused on that like-to-like kind of move, and you never get, as you said, that millisecond parity. So if you relax that constraint, now I can focus on, look, I'm just going to get it up there, and have it run, utilizing the more modern technology. I can go back over time and improve and tune the performance if I want to. But, day one, I'm not focused on the underlying hardware being the same. And the stack being the same. I'm just focused on the output and the outcome of using the application being the same. >> Exactly, and there is something very critical you just pointed on. That is, in a migration, in a kind of classic migration, what happens is, the moment somebody opens the hood on the current system, and says, "hey, we're re-platforming this to the cloud." There is a myriad of people coming out of the woodworks and saying, "hey, I have all these janitorial tasks I've been sitting on for the last five years." And so migration very quickly has that scope creep and turns into a huge furball of all sorts of unmanageable stuff. And that is why, I believe Gardner put it at 60 to 70% of migrations failing, because it's just spiraling out of control. What we give IT leaders is the ability to take these two things apart. Move, move first, move everything. Move right now. Move at an incredibly short timeline. And then afterwards, look at your application. And there's usually three categories. One of them is, run these forever. That's kind of your mission critical, but fairly established applications. Then there's a second category of well, we always wanted to rewrite this thing, we just never found time, and for all sorts of business reasons, we want to rewrite this. So modernize this at your own kind of, pace on your own dime. >> But on that one, just to interrupt for a second, your focus on modernizing, maybe the user interface, how the integration, how it gets, gathers data from other places. Making it faster, cheaper, simpler. You're not focused on modernizing the underlying hardware. >> Right, yeah, you're really looking at the business at this point. And that's the critical piece. And then the last category is stuff that, well, we should probably deprecate these applications anyways, and it's usually a much smaller group. But that separation of migration and modernization, that is what really resonates well with the IT leaders. >> Yeah, 'cause I mean at the end of the day, as you said, a lot of the people that come out of the woodwork are the people who have built their careers on tuning the database manager to a particular set of targets. And when you say, whoa, the target no longer is the operating constraint. The constraint now is, can we achieve the same outcome and we'll focus on improving it, or adjusting it, or changing it, later, based on the business needs. >> Exactly. >> Okay, so let's get now to the last one. This leads to a different way of thinking about your database manager. Whereas historically, database professionals have thought in terms of, to get this outcome, how much do I have to pay? When we think about the notion of digital business, data being an asset that can be combined and recombined, and applied, and copied, a lot of different ways, to create potentially derivative value, it sounds as though you're proposing that we can unlock a potential unlimited streams of future value out of data once we get it to a place where we're not worried about the impact on the underlying hardware. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, think of it as doing away with the data silos. It's not about getting your database into the Cloud, and then having it sit in the database, but really getting the data into the Cloud, and making it available to all the myriad of processing techniques and applications that Cloud service providers and third parties put out there. And having the ability to process your data with AI, ML, you name it, advanced analytics, et cetera. Without having to shovel it out of the database and back in every time you do that. And so, getting the data really there is kind of the holy grail for enterprise in the next five to 10 years, that's what they need to solve. >> Now, we've seen a lot of our clients are talking about 2019 being the year that they actually put their first strategic stake in the ground about how they're going to use Cloud. By that I mean, not the emergent, or the optimistic Greenfield stuff, or not moving personal productivity, but actually starting to think about those high-value, what we call HVTA, high value traditional applications, and starting to think about what role they're going to play. So as you look forward, where do you think this technology is in a couple of years, in terms of simplifying this whole process for enterprises? >> So, first off, 2019 I believe is going to be the year of the Cloud for the enterprise. >> Yeah, we do too, yeah. >> And it's been a long time coming, but finally I think we've reached critical threshold. And it's a wildfire out there right now. It's fantastic to watch. Now, taking this kind of technology that we're building and kind of spinning this quick forward, think of it a little bit like VMware for databases is what, one of our first prospects called it, once I explained what it is. And we first scratched our heads, like, hmm, I'm not quite sure how that kind of fits the description. But then we did some archeology and realized the parallels between these approaches. First off, what we do is virtualization. So, naturally there's a technical parallel there. But then when you look at today, Vmware doesn't make the money with the hypervisor. What they make the money with is all the functionality that they were able to layer on top of it. Dozens and dozens of V products. That's where the real value comes from. And similar in our environment, building that hypervisor today is great for that immediate shift to the Cloud, et cetera. But then long-term, there's a much larger value proposition. And that's really about functionality that can be layered on top of this. And think about it that way, we're creating a new geography, that didn't exist before. Where you had either functionality sitting in the application, and then copied across thousands of applications. Or try to shoehorn it into the database. And that usually didn't go so well either. So we give people, long-term, that whole vision of there's functionality in the space in between, that is much richer than actually a database, or the application itself. So that's where we go. >> All right, so I got one last question, Mike, and then I'll let you go. So, you mentioned earlier that there are certain workloads that people may be more willing to move, but it's not necessarily limited by technology. But, I'm a CIO, I get the Datometry diving rod, and I walk into my shop, and I start moving around. What class of applications is that stick looking at? Or what, is there a particular environment, or a particular machine, or particular database manager that the stick keeps pointing towards? >> We give you something way better than that stick. And that is, since we sit so low in the stack, we're agnostic to the application. And it really depends on what are the parameters of an application, et cetera, which we have no visibility into it. So what we give you is a system that we call Q-Insight. That allows you to run your workload logs from your existing data warehouse, for example. And simulate it through our system. And we actually tell you what would happen if you ran on one or the other database. And at the end of this process, we give you a scorecard. That lets you tease apart, what are the applications? That do one or the other thing. What are the features? What's the complexity that's in there? And we give people that at a high-resolution that they've never seen before. And that is the kind of, the stepping stone or the beginning, that's the rod, really. That allows people to select, okay, this application first, this next, and so on and so forth. And that is why I said at the beginning, I love talking to enterprises at the beginning of their journey, because this is where we already bring a huge benefit to the table. That they were really struggling with not having. And so, this is where the kind of circle closes. >> Wow, interesting stuff, Mike. So, once again, Mike Waas, the CEO of Datometry. We've been talking about database migration and new tooling and technologies for facilitating that and simplifying that in large organizations. Mike, thank you very much for being on theCUBE. >> It's been a great pleasure, thanks for having us. >> And once again, I'm Peter Burris, and this has been another CUBE Conversation. Until next time. (triumphant string music)

(lively music) >> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation, here in theCUBE's Palo Alto studios. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of theCUBE and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, theCUBE. Here with Mike Waas who is the CEO and founder of Datometry, a hot startup doing some interesting things in the cloud with data. We love data, great. Welcome to theCUBE Conversation. Thanks for coming in today. >> Thanks for having me. >> So you guys have an interesting approach. Interesting, I love the model. You're in the tornado as we say. You kind of got the cloud game going on around you, a unique approach, very focused solution. I love the, I want to get into it because it's really compelling. But I want you to take a minute first to explain what the business is, how you guys founded, how'd you get here, what's the core value proposition that you guys do? >> All right, well, Datometry is a venture-funded startup. We are still in the early stages, but we've seen great traction across the market. What we realized was really that as cloud catches on, every IT leader is scratching their heads, how do I get my data assets into the cloud. And one of the interesting elements there is that it's really the applications that's the difficult thing to move to the cloud. Because you end up rewriting them and very quickly people realize it's pretty bad ROI. And so they're looking for a solution that effectively allows them to take these applications, move them to the cloud as is and cut down time, be it three, five years and obviously time and risk dramatically. And that exactly is Datometry. Think of it as the VMware for databases so to speak. >> So is it software as a service? Is it a software approach? What's the product business model real quick? >> It's a software platform and we have SaaS platform delivery as well. But think of it as really almost like a logical hypervisor that sits between the application and the database. >> So I buy software from you, I'm the customer? >> Yes, well, you buy a subscription from us. >> Okay, got it. Okay, great. So what's the core challenge that you guys solve? Because obviously the migrations to the cloud. I talked to Andy Jassy at Amazon, and he's like, everyone's going to be in the public cloud. You talk to someone at VMware, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. So, again, different biased perspectives, and I appreciate Andy's view. But also, customers want choice. But we know that everyone wants to go to the cloud. Every startup that I know never starts with a data center unless they have a unique situation. They go to the cloud. So cloud's a nice place to go. The challenge is how do they go there, and how do I just go to Microsoft and Amazon. How do I use multiple clouds? What's your solution do for that? >> So first off, we love all databases. We are multi-cloud and what we really see IT leaders struggle with is kind of figuring out A what's the right cloud for them and that's very often driven by business decisions, by all sorts of additional stuff that we kind of stay out of it. But then it very quickly comes down to the technical bits and pieces. And that is I have my applications today in the data center. I need to get them to the cloud. And I don't want to spend these egregious amounts of money to rewrite everything. And if you think of it from a CIO perspective, this is an enormous amount of risk. Typically, these migration projects are currently slated for three to five years which is pretty much all the time you got as a CIO. So this better work or you're going to look really, really bad at the end of that. >> You'll be gone or shelved. >> Exactly. >> The CIO could be. It's like a sports athlete, four years and then you're a free agent again or you get renewed as a franchise player kind of thing. But this is interesting. I want to get into this. So moving the data is one thing. Migration to the cloud is a number one concern we hear from people because obviously there are some economic benefits. But there's all kinds of challenges around data, data mobility, lock in, am I going to get stuck in the cloud. I have a vendor selection on premise. I have multi-year licenses. It just becomes kind of like, I give up. But they want a path there. So I want to ask you about a concept that you and I were talking about before we came on called the migration paradox. >> Yeah. And you brought that up. Explain what the migration paradox is for an enterprise who wants to move to the cloud. >> So it's a very interesting thing that when we start talking to people who are facing migration to the cloud, we realize that most of them actually have not really kind of found yet how big of a challenge that's going to be. So a lot of people believe when they first look at database migration, they believe it's all about transferring the content. And that's kind of where their thinking almost ends. But the interesting or paradoxical thing is the hard thing about database migration is actually not migrating the content of the database, but it's the applications. Moving the schema, moving the data, this is something that people have down. >> Amazon's been a great tool. >> It takes three to six months something like that >> You can snowmobile it. You can snowplow, whatever they have, those tools. They do it, a lot of Oracle environments, we see that. But that's not enough. >> Exactly, so there's a lot of tooling that takes care of this. But then you're left with modifying or even rewriting you applications. And that typically is about 80 or even more percent of your actually cost. And so that's what we call the paradox about the migration, that you really need to take care of the applications. The content of the database, that's the easy part. >> So the paradox is interesting, but the other question that comes up is, which is good, thanks for clarifying that. The other challenge is as a technical person, architect, CIO, whoever, where do I optimize my time? And this is a question they're asking themselves. So I got to ask you, if I'm moving to the cloud, say, now I got multi-cloud. I want to have Amazon and Azure, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, where do I spend my time? Do I optimize my database? Do I think about my database as the main source of truth? Or do I think about database as a now cloud world which is borderless? You have applications that have database needs. So kind of the thinking around the database becomes challenged in terms of how you think about it. >> And it changes fundamentally from we've seen, let's say 10, 20 years ago where the database is really kind of your ivory tower where all the functionality, the complexity is really residing there and your applications are just satellites to it. And nobody ever wanted that. People would rather solve data problems than database problems. But the database was always so dominant. And that was the only way of getting there. And so what we feel is going to be the model of the future is that you an actually focus on your applications. That's where your business is. This is where the value for your business comes from. And the database really becomes a commodity. When was the last time you bought a file system? These things just come with the platform. And you really want to focus on your investment in the application. >> Databases are in everything now. So it's not like the market for databases is basically every application (laughs). >> Exactly. >> So I want to ask you something because I've been thinking about this. I want to get your thoughts on it because you're a founder and CEO of a company and you're in the middle of the database world. So we've been on the DevOps thing since day one. We've been early. And back in the old days, networks were, they dictated terms. The network guys and the network architecture dictated what was enabled on top of it. In comes the cloud and DevOps which smashes that paradigm. It says, hey, you know what? Let's make the network programmable. So that changes the game in terms of who's now in charge. DevOps created an extraction layer that allows for programmable infrastructures. The infrastructure is code. We know how that turned out. That's the cloud. Hello, everyone's being disrupted. Now Ciscos of the world are actually doing better because they're actually bringing the programing to a whole other level. So they're now riding that wave. So at the end of the day, it was better for the networking industry to go DevOps. You could say the same thing's happening in the database world. Where the database used to dictate terms, now the applications are in charge. They're all going to have databases. So do you see a similar paradigm with that where I don't really care what database is out there as long as my app runs. I should be programming my databases in the similar way that DevOps used to program the network. So database is code? >> Absolutely. And you're touching on really the core revolution of IT over the last 10, 15 years. And that's virtualization. Everything in the IT stack has been shredded over the last 20 years. And the only thing that has been holding out is the database. And when you look closely virtualization really means that two things that are otherwise bonded tightly together, kind of get pried apart, an abstraction gets put in between, and suddenly you create that new geography for functionality, for all sorts of things including additional companies and opportunities that kind of spring up in that space. We've seen this with software-defined networking, as you said, with storage, with compute anyways. But databases were the last kind of corner in the data center that managed to hold out with this very strong, well, every application is bolted on my database principle. And that's exactly what we want to kind of take apart now, where we think the time is ready for this. >> And web services and services now, microservices and containers you're seeing amazing new capabilities around software, software needs databases. Sometimes it's stateless, stateful. These things are interesting new innovation areas. How is that changing the database world and the database architecture? And two, how is that, obviously it's helping the cloud service providers. So this new paradigm that's happening at the application level has kind of flipped things upside down. Your thoughts and reactions to that. >> I think the database people have always been a bit envious of all the other adjacent spaces because they did have that virtualization component to it. And so you had a lot more flexibility. You have the liberty to just move your stuff, mix and match, whatever makes most sense. And on the database side, you've always kind of been locked in to, well, this is the choice that I made 10 years ago, and it's going to be really difficult to get out of this. So we obviously believe that's the future. People really want that liberty. And what we see from talking to CIOs and IT leaders is that's one of the biggest problems that they've always had in their IT stack. But they just couldn't move their applications, that they were always kind of tied to decisions they made in the past to legacy. And we think it's time to completely redefine that space. >> So you guys have been very successful. I'm going to give you some props. I know that Amazon and Microsoft who are really killing it in the cloud. Obviously Amazon that's really the present creation creating cloud. As your numbers are off the charts Look at Microsoft's stock price. It's been very successful. Satya Nadella has turned that ship to be complete cloud first. And they really are moving a lot of the Microsoft legacy business into the cloud and, with it, their ecosystem which is the enterprises. What has been some of the challenges that you've seen for those enterprises? Because we know that they have a relationship with Microsoft over many, many years on their side. Amazon has a lot of cloud native enterprises and developers. Their challenge is to get to the cloud, but they got to really kind of build the airplane at 30,000 feet if you will. >> Oh absolutely. >> John: This is a huge challenge. >> The interesting little detail is that where we are right now with cloud, it's no longer for the early adopters. Ironically, it's actually not the early adopters. The early adopters are still busy kind of figuring their stuff out in their data center and wanting to be-- >> Out launching and decentralized applications and doing ICOs really. (laughs) >> Yeah, and they want to be a software company and what have you. But it's actually the much more later or laterish adopters of technology that really go to cloud now. And it's very interesting to see this because we kind of jump over the chiasm if you will in the classic adopter curve. And what we see there is different verticals, different types of companies gravitate to different clouds simply because it matches their DNA. >> What they have a track record in. I mean, Microsoft has years of experience. >> Exactly. >> And even Oracle has success in the cloud. You're seeing what they're doing. Well, they claim it, we'll see the numbers. But they still have the licensing issue as a database vendor. I think the IT you brought up is interesting, and I want to just double click on that because IT has changed. I think there's a realization now in IT that, okay, it's a serverless model. It's not about provisioning on top of racketing or doing all this data center traditional stuff. It's about cloud operations on prem and also on the cloud. How do you guys fit into that story? Is that the kind of customer you guys want to reach? Or is it someone doing a full wholesale changeover? What's the kind of profile customer? Because they're looking at cloud and saying, hey, we get the IT game has changed. It's a services business. We got security challenges. We got to have this multicloud. Where do you fit in? >> So there is not kind of a cookie cutter customer for us, but it's really the Fortune 500, the Global 2,000. It's the big guys. And what we see there is, they're kind of trying to figure this out for them right now. And that's a fantastic challenge to be part of. At the same time, they are the ones who realize that the only thing that they love about their database is the create interface and maybe the way how they get data in and out. What they really loathe about it is operations and maintenance. And so they look at the cloud databases now as, wow, somebody, kind of reduced all of this to an API. And I don't need to have all this other stuff, all the operations, all the stuff that I always hated about my database is suddenly gone. And so for them, this is monumental shift. >> It's freedom. >> Yeah. This is unique. >> They're freed from the hostage situation that's been in place for many years. >> That's an interesting way of putting it. (John laughs) So they really like the idea that it's down to an API, and, more importantly, they don't have to tune the heck out of this anymore. I've been in databases for 20 years, and one of the big disciplines has always been tune this thing and kind of shave a couple milliseconds here an there. And that was primarily because there was always a fixed hardware footprint that constrained people. Now, in the cloud, you have a single slider, and you say more or less. And it's a couple of dollars a month more. And you kind of get yourself out of that pickle. >> And also, you now have IT operations, another area that's been kind of automated, well, automated in a good way to see everything in terms of latency and whatnot. So I got to ask you the question around from a database perspective since you're a pro at it, the multicloud dilemma is interesting because there's no doubt that multicloud is on a lot of people's minds especially ones that have large applications because there's different use cases. I have a relationship with this or this is good for me, that's good for me, but also working workloads around clouds. I want to move to better pricing an Azure down the road. So there's definitely a leaning into multicloud. What is the trade offs for multicloud in your opinion? What's the pros and cons for someone who's thinking about migrating their applications and data to a multicloud architecture? >> I think we've seen only kind of the very beginning of the multicloud story yet. And when you look at the different clouds kind of from a performance or a scale perspective, there are a lot of similarities. There are a couple interesting differences. But one thing that from a database perspective is going to be really interesting is these databases that we see on the clouds that are really integrated now, they have access to special hardware, what have you. They're really fundamentally a part of the cloud. And kind of really become a commodity. And so for an enterprise, one of the the things that they need to kind of go through is what's the premium for multicloud that they're willing to pay versus optimizing for a specific cloud. And that's not an easy decision. Now, we're multicloud >> And what's the difference >> between those two? >> Well, as as separate cloud, as a third-party database on a cloud, you're effectively kind of catering to the common denominator across all clouds. >> You're just hosting on their cloud, basically. >> Right, and so, you take what you get. And you're not really optimizing that well for a specific cloud. And that kind of gives your product a completely different look and feel than, let's say, an integrated cloud database. And, at the same time, it kind of gives you that freedom of being multicloud and flexible. And that's a thing where I think the jury is still out. >> The integrated side, you're taking about the integrated side. >> Well for the third-party database vendors where, okay, you have that freedom to just move across the cloud so you pay a premium for that compared to the databases that are integrated. But it's unclear today, I think, is that premium really worth it. And how will people deal with this going forward. >> Basically, it's a moving train because they that to constantly trace latency and basically run operations on the cloud, someone's cloud, basically. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So integrated seems to me a better approach if I was going to look at that technically. So how ideal with that because that would be the preferred. Now, as say a developer or an IT guy, well, integrated database on Microsoft, I got an integrated database on Amazon. Two different code bases. (laughs) I got EC2, S3 and all this stuff on Amazon, and I got different. Do I have to hire different coders to do that? So what's your response to that? >> We let you take whatever you've got and whatever your skillset is today and move that across different platforms, across different databases so that you can find out what's the one that's best for your business. And we love all databases >> Do I have to hire separate coders for each platform or do you do that for me? >> No, you can keep whatever you have. Whatever skillset you already have in-house, whatever familiarity you have for the database that your folks have already started out with, you just take that along to the next platform. And that's a very unique liberty. >> Whatever they want, they don't want to hire new people. The whole goal is to-- >> Exactly >> have people focused on high-yield tasks. >> And they'll be productive on day one. They hit the ground running. >> All right, so what's the ideal customer for you? Obviously, you have a great relationship with the cloud, sounds like on the integrated side. If someone's watching this video or might be interested in your product, what are some of the ping points that they would have, what are some of the conversations they may have in their meetings that would tell them that they should be talking to you guys? >> Absolutely, so most of our customers as we talked about before, really come through our partners. Our partners stand a lot to gain from this. And so we go to market with the big cloud service providers, and what we see as a typical pattern is people have kind of matured in their journey to the cloud from just being aspirational, I want to go to the cloud to I figured out which cloud I want to go or even have done some experimentation. And so at that point, they're ready to pull the trigger. They say, okay, I realize this is cloud, this is the data warehouse that I want to go to. And then they realize the next step, okay, this would take me three to five years to migrate all that stuff. And it's going to take me anywhere between five to 10 to 20 million dollars, and it's this enormous amount of risk. And that is usually the point where we have that conversation with that customer to kind of completely upend that equation and say, well, we can do this in actually just a few months at at fraction of the cost, at a fraction of the risk. >> Yeah, and it could've cost them $20 million to move it (laughs). All right, I have two final questions for you to end this segment. Thanks for coming, it's been great to chat with you. The first one is to the decision-maker of your customer base if you're on a joint call with one of the big clouds, what's the message to the decision-maker if you had to just tighten up that message? And the second part is, to the user, the person who gets to move the action over. Two audiences, decision-maker, what's the main benefits of what you guys do, and to the person who's going to end up deploying it, what's the message to those guys? >> So for the decision maker, I think the message is simply, you cannot afford not talking to us because the economics of what we do are just so overwhelming or not going with us, is going to be really overwhelming for you. And so that is really about we let you get to the cloud quick. What we see there right now is it's not about kind of change your platform and your hardware. Smart enterprises, I think, get that huge opportunity right now to outmaneuver their competition if they get to the cloud rapidly. And so this is really at the decision-maker's mind of all the major companies. For the end user, the message is simply keep what you're doing. Keep doing what you're doing right now. You don't need to acquire a new skillset. Now you can as you go to the cloud. We don't keep you in whatever you do right now. We give you the ability to mix and match to do all sorts of things. But you don't need to just relearn everything just because you moved to the cloud. >> Awesome, Mike, thanks for coming in and explaining the value of proposition and talk about some of the industry trends around the databases. Certainly, everyone knows I love to talk about databases, especially when you have the big guys out there. And some of them have been called hostage holders, but, I mean, the freeing up of the data is what we believe in. We think that the cloud and movements like decentralized internet, around decentralized applications is a big trend coming, blockchain is certainly significant when the ICO hype dies away in the next year or so, you're going to start to see a lot new new generation of applications in charge and programing the data. So I think that's going to be big. It's CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (lively music)