(upbeat electronic music) >> Live from San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Dataworks Summit 2018, brought to you by Hortonworks. (electronic whooshing) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dataworks, here in San Jose, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, James Kobielus. We have two guests in this segment, we have Steve Wooledge, he is the VP of Product Marketing at Arcadia Data, and Satya Ramachandran, who is the VP of Engineering at Neustar. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Our pleasure and thank you. >> So let's start out by setting the scene for our viewers. Tell us a little bit about what Arcadia Data does. >> Arcadia Data is focused on getting business value from these modern scale-out architectures, like Hadoop, and the Cloud. We started in 2012 to solve the problem of how do we get value into the hands of the business analysts that understand a little bit more about the business, in addition to empowering the data scientists to deploy their models and value to a much broader audience. So I think that's been, in some ways, the last mile of value that people need to get out of Hadoop and data lakes, is to get it into the hands of the business. So that's what we're focused on. >> And start seeing the value, as you said. >> Yeah, seeing is believing, a picture is a thousand words, all those good things. And what's really emerging, I think, is companies are realizing that traditional BI technology won't solve the scale and user concurrency issues, because architecturally, big data's different, right? We're on the scale-out, MPP architectures now, like Hadoop, the data complexity and variety has changed, but the BI tools are still the same, and you pull the data out of the system to put it into some little micro cube to do some analysis. Companies want to go after all the data, and view the analysis across a much broader set, and that's really what we enable. >> I want to hear about the relationship between your two companies, but Satya, tell us a little about Neustar, what you do. >> Neustar is an information services company, we are built around identity. We are the premiere identity provider, the most authoritative identity provider for the US. And we built a whole bunch of services around that identity platform. I am part of the marketing solutions group, and I head the analytics engineering for marketing solutions. The product that I work on helps marketers do their annual planning, as well as their campaign or tactical planning, so that they can fine tune their campaigns on an ongoing basis. >> So how do you use Arcadia Data's primary product? >> So we are a predictive analytics platform, the reporting solution, we use Arcadia for the reporting part of it. So we have multi terabytes of advertising data in our values, and so we use Arcadia to provide fast taxes to our customers, and also very granular and explorative analysis of this data. High (mumbles) and explorative analysis of this data. >> So you say you help your customers with their marketing campaigns, so are you doing predictive analytics? And are you during churn analysis and so forth? And how does Arcadia fit into all of that? >> So we get data and then they build an activation model, which tells how the marketing spent corresponds to the revenue. We not only do historical analysis, we also do predictive, in the sense that the marketers frequently done what-if analysis, saying that, what if I moved my budget from page search to TV? And how does it affect the revenue? So all of this modeling is built by Neustar, the modeling platform is built by the Neustar, but the last mile of taking these reports and providing this explorative analysis of the results, that is provided by the reporting solution, which is Arcadia. >> Well, I mean, the thing about data analytics, is that it really is going to revolutionize marketing. That famous marketing adage of, I know my advertising works, I just don't know which half, and now we're really going to be able to figure out which half. Can you talk a little bit about return on investment and what your clients see? >> Sure, we've got some major Fortune 500 companies that have said publicly that they've realized over a billion dollars of incremental value. And that could be across both marketing analytics, and how we better treat our messaging, our brand, to reach our intended audience. There's things like supply chain and being able to more realtime analyze what-if analysis for different routes, it's things like cyber security and stopping fraud and waste and things like that at a much grander scale than what was really possible in the past. >> So we're here at Dataworks and it's the Hortonworks show. Give us a sense of the degree of your engagement or partnership with Hortonworks and participation in their partner ecosystem. >> Yeah, absolutely. Hortonworks is one of our key partners, and what we did that's different architecturally, is we built our BI server directly into the data platforms. So what I mean by that is, we take the concept of a BI server, we install it and run it on the data nodes of Hortonworks Data Platform. We inherit the security directly out of systems like Apache Ranger, so that all that administration and scale is done at Hadoop economics, if you will, and it leverages the things that are already in place. So that has huge advantages both in terms of scale, but also simplicity, and then you get the performance, the concurrency that companies need to deploy out to like, 5,000 users directly on that Hadoop cluster. So, Hortonworks is a fantastic partner for us and a large number of our customers run on Hortonworks, as well as other platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, where Satya's got his system deployed. >> At the show they announced Hortonworks Data Platform 3.0. There's containerization there, there's updates to Hive to enable it to be more of a realtime analytics, and also a data warehousing engine. In Arcadia Data, do you follow their product enhancements, in terms of your own product roadmap with any specific, fixed cycle? Are you going to be leveraging the new features in HDP 3.0 going forward to add value to your customers' ability to do interactive analysis of this data in close to realtime? >> Sure, yeah, no, because we're a native-- >> 'Cause marketing campaigns are often in realtime increasingly, especially when you're using, you know, you got a completely digital business. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we benefit from the innovations happening within the Hortonworks Data Platform. So, because we're a native BI tool that runs directly within that system, you know, with changes in Hive, or different things within HDFS, in terms of performance or compression and things like that, our customers generally benefit from that directly, so yeah. >> Satya, going forward, what are some of the problems that you want to solve for your clients? What is their biggest pain points and where do you see Neustar? >> So, data is the new island, right? So, marketers, also for them now, data is the biggest, is what they're going after. They want faster analysis, they want to be able to get to insights as fast as they can, and they want to obviously get, work on as large amount of data as possible. The variety of sources is becoming higher and higher and higher, in terms of marketing. There used to be a few channels in '70s and '80s, and '90s kind of increased, now you have like, hundreds of channels, if not thousands of channels. And they want visibility across all of that. It's the ability to work across this variety of data, increasing volume at a very high speed. Those are high level challenges that we have at Neustar. >> Great. >> So the difference, marketing attribution analysis you say is one of the core applications of your solution portfolio. How is that more challenging now than it had been in the past? We have far more marketing channels, digital and so forth, then how does the state-of-the-art of marketing attribution analysis, how is it changing to address this multiplicity of channels and media for advertising and for influencing the customer on social media and so forth? And then, you know, can you give us a sense for then, what are the necessary analytical tools needed for that? We often hear about a social graph analysis or semantic analysis, or for behavioral analytics and so forth, all of this makes it very challenging. How can you determine exactly what influences a customer now in this day and age, where, you think, you know, Twitter is an influencer over the conversation. How can you nail that down to specific, you know, KPIs or specific things to track? >> So I think, from our, like you pointed out, the variety is increasing, right? And I think the marketers now have a lot more options than what they have, and that that's a blessing, and it's also a curse. Because then I don't know where I'm going to move my marketing spending to. So, attribution right now, is still sitting at the headquarters, it's kind of sitting at a very high level and it is answering questions. Like we said, with the Fortune 100 companies, it's still answering questions to the CMOs, right? Where attribution will take us, next step is to then lower down, where it's able to answer the regional headquarters on what needs to happen, and more importantly, on every store, I'm able to then answer and tailor my attribution model to a particular store. Let's take Ford for an example, right? Now, instead of the CMO suite, but, if I'm able to go to every dealer, and I'm able to personal my attribution to that particular dealer, then it becomes a lot more useful. The challenge there is it all needs to be connected. Whatever model we are working for the dealer, needs to be connected up to the headquarters. >> Yes, and that personalization, it very much leverages the kind of things that Steve was talking about at Arcadia. Being able to analyze all the data to find those micro, micro, micro segments that can be influenced to varying degrees, so yeah. I like where you're going with this, 'cause it very much relates to the power of distributing federated big data fabrics like Hortonworks' offers. >> And so it's streaming analytics is coming to forward, and it's been talked about for the past longest period of time, but we have real use cases for streaming analytics right now. Similarly, the large volumes of the data volumes is, indeed, becoming a lot more. So both of them are doing a lot more right now. >> Yes. >> Great. >> Well, Satya and Steve, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, this was really, really fun talking to you. >> Excellent. >> Thanks, it was great to meet you. Thanks for having us. >> I love marketing talk. >> (laughs) It's fun. I'm Rebecca Knight, for James Kobielus, stay tuned to theCUBE, we will have more coming up from our live coverage of Dataworks, just after this. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Hello, we are here On the Ground. This is theCUBE's On the Ground program at Centrify's Headquarters. We go to Cricket Liu, chief DNS officer at Infoblox. Been with the company from the beginning. Great to see you again. Wrote the book on DNS. What year was that? That was between DNS, was like, when I was born. >> Yeah, 1992. September 1992 was when it was published. >> Great to see you. We've done some podcasts together over the years. >> Yeah, good to see you too. >> DNS, now obviously global, ICANN's now global, it's part of the U.N., all different governance bodies, but it's certainly still critical infrastructure. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Critical infrastructure is now the big conversation as the security paradigm has moved from data center to the Cloud, there's no perimeter anymore. >> Yeah. >> How is that changing the DNS game? >> Well, I think that folks are starting to realize how critical DNS is. In October of last year, we had that huge DDoS attack against Dyn, the big DNS hosting provider in New Hampshire and I think that woke a lot of folks up. A lot of folks realized, holy cow, these guys are not too big to fail as they say. Even though they have enormous infrastructure, widely distributed around the globe, they have such a concentrational power that a huge number of really, really popular web properties were inaccessible for quite sometime, so I think that caused a lot of people to look at their own DNS infrastructure and to reevaluate it and say, well maybe I need to do something. >> Interesting about the stack wars that are going on, that attack, as we've lived through and you've been part of it as chief technical officer in many companies. DNS was always that part where it'd be secure but now you have block change, you have new kinds of infrastructure with mobile computing now over 10 years post iPhone. >> Yep, the critical moment. >> How has infrastructure changed, beyond DNS 'cause it still needs to work together? >> Yeah, well, it's funny because we do have all of these new types of devices. We do have new technologies. But a lot of things have remained the same. DNS is still the same. The remarkable thing is that the latest version in my book is 10 years old, actually 11 years old now, so it's older than the iPhone and people still buy it because the underlying theory is still the same. It hasn't changed. It's a testament, really, to the quality of the original design of DNS that it still works for anything and that it's scaled to serve a network as diverse and as large as the internet is today. >> What's your biggest observation, looking back over the past decade with DNS, about the emergence of virtual machines, now Cloud. Again, the game is still the same 'cause DNS is the plumbing and it provides a lot of the key critical infrastructure for the web and now mobile. What's the biggest observations that you've seen over the decade? >> Well I'd say one of the things that's happened over the last several years that's maybe the most important development in DNS is something that we call response policy zones. Up until now, DNS servers have just been sort of blithely complicit when it comes to, for example, malware. Malware wakes up on a device and it assumes that it has DNS available to it and it uses DNS, for example, to find command to control server, maybe a drop server to exfiltrate data to. In the DNS server, even though it's being asked to look up the address record for CommandAndControlServer.Malware.Org, it just happily goes along with it. A few years ago, Paul Vixie, who I've known for a very long time, came up with this idea called response policy zones which is basically to imbue our DNS servers with resolution policy so that you can tell them, hey if you get a query for a domain name that we know is being used maliciously, don't answer it. Don't resolve it like you normally do. Instead, hand back a little white lie like that doesn't exist and moreover, log the fact that somebody looked it up because it's a good indication that they're infected. >> So bringing policy to DNS is really making it more intelligent. >> Yeah, that's right. >> And certainly as networks grow, I was just watching some of my friends setting up the wireless at Burning Man and the whole new change of how Wi-Fi is being deployed and how networks are being constructed is really coming down to some of the basic principles of DNS to route more, be responsive, and this is kind of a new change. >> Yeah, there's a lot going on in changes to the deployment of DNS. It used to be that most big companies ran all their own DNS infrastructure. At this point, I think most large companies don't bother running, for example, what we'd call their external authoritative DNS infrastructure. They give that to a big hosting provider to do, somebody like Dyn or Verisign or Neustar or somebody like that, so that's a big change. >> Cricket, I want to ask you about the CyberConnect Event going on in New York. Infoblox is involved. Security is paramount, so now an industry event. Centrify is the main sponsor. You guys are involved as a vendor, but it's not a vendor event, it's a industry event. It's a broad category. What's your thoughts on this kind of industry event? Usually in events it's been Black Hat or vendor events pushing their wares and selling their stuff but now security is global. What's your take on this event? >> Well, I'm hoping to be able to spend a little bit of time talking to folks who come to the event about DNS and how it can be used as a tool in their security tool chain. The folks who come to us as Infoblox to our events already know about DNS. They're already network administrators or they're responsible for DNS or something like that. My hope is that we can reach a broader audience through CyberConnect and actually talk to folks who maybe haven't considered DNS as a security tool. Who maybe haven't thought about the necessity to bolster their DNS infrastructure. >> One final question since we're on bonus material time. I've got to ask you about the global landscape. I mean, in my early days involved in DNS when I came was from the '98 to the 2000 time frame. International domain names were Unicode. That's not ASCII. So that technically wasn't DNS, but still, they were keywords. They had this global landscape in, say, China, that actually wasn't DNS so there's all these abstraction layers. Has anything actually evolved out of that trend of really bringing an abstraction layer on top of DNS and certainly now with the nation-states with security are issues, China, Russia, et cetera. How does all that play out? >> Well, international domain names have actually taken off in some areas. And basically it's as you say, you have the ability now to use Unicode labels in domain names in certain contexts, for example, if you're using your web browser you can type in a Unicode domain name and then what the web browser does is it translates it into an equivalent ASCII representation and then resolves it using DNS which is the traditional DNS that doesn't actually know about Unicode. There are actually some very interesting security implications to using Unicode. For example, people can register things that have Unicode, we would say, glyphs in them that look exactly like regular ASCII characters. For example, you could register paypal.com where the A's are actually lowercase A's in Cyrillic. It's not the same code point as an ASCII A. So it's visually. >> Great for hackers. >> Oh yeah. Visually indistinguishable from paypal.com in a lot of contexts and people might click on it and go to a page that looks like PayPal's. >> John: So its a phishing dream. >> Yeah, really dangerous potentially and so we're working out some of the implications of that, trying to figure out, within, for example, web browsers, how do we protect the user from things like this? >> And a lot of SSL out there, now you're seeing HTTPS everywhere. Is that now the norm? >> Yeah, actually, within the internet engineering task force, the IETF, after it became obvious that state-sponsored-- >> John: Attacks. >> Eavesdropping. >> You were smiling. >> Was kind of the norm. >> Got to find the right word. >> Yeah, the IETF embarked on an effort called DPRIVE and DPRIVE is basically a bunch of individual tracks to encrypt basically every single part of the DNS channel, especially that between what we call a stub resolver and the recursive DNS server so that if you're a customer here in the United States and a subscriber to an ISP like Comcast or whomever, you can make sure that that first hop between your computer and the ISP is secured. >> We're getting down and dirty under the hood with Cricket Liu on DNS. I got to ask kind of up level to the consumer. One of the things that kind of pisses me off the most when I'm surfing the web is you see the browser doesn't resolve or you go hit someone's website, oh yeah, something.io, these new domain names, top level gTLDs are out there, .media, all these, and companies have firewalls or whatever their equipment is and it doesn't let it through. Because they're trying to protect the perimeter still, must be, I mean, what does that mean when companies aren't letting those URLs then, it is a firewall issue or is it more they're still perimeter based, they're not resolving it, they're afraid of malware? Somethings aren't resolving in? What does that mean? >> Well I think as often as not it's an operational problem. It could be just a misconfiguration on the part of the folks who are hosting the target website's DNS. It could be that. I don't know a lot of folks who-- >> So it's one of their policies or something, it's just kind of locking down. >> Could be that too. Or it could be, for example, that they have a proxy server and they're trying to limit access to the internet by category. Maybe it does categorization and filtering by-- >> Can you work on that? Can you write some code for that? Well thanks, great to see you, thanks for sharing this conversation here On The Ground at Centrify. >> You're welcome. >> And good luck with the CyberConnect Conference. >> Yeah, nice to see you too. >> Alright, I'm John Furrier with On The Ground here on theCUBE at Centfity's headquarters in Silicon Valley. Thanks for watching.