>>Okay. Today we welcome Evan Kaplan, CEO of Influx Data, the company behind Influx DB Welcome, Evan. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, John. Thanks for having me. >>Great segment here on the influx. DB Story. What is the story? Take us through the history. Why Time series? What's the story? >>So the history of history is actually actually pretty interesting. Paul Dicks, my partner in this and our founder, um, super passionate about developers and developer experience. And, um, he had worked on Wall Street building a number of times series kind of platform trading platforms for trading stocks. And from his point of view, it was always what he would call a yak shave, which means you have to do a tonne of work just to start doing work. Which means you have to write a bunch of extrinsic routines. You had to write a bunch of application handling on existing relational databases in order to come up with something that was optimised for a trading platform or a time series platform. And he sort of he just developed This real clear point of view is this is not how developers should work. And so in 2013, he went through y Combinator and he built something for he made his first commit to open source influx TB at the end of 2013. And basically, you know, from my point of view, you invented modern time series, which is you start with a purpose built time series platform to do these kind of work clothes, and you get all the benefits of having something right out of the box or developer can be totally productive right away. >>And how many people in the company What's the history of employees and stuff? Yeah, >>I think we're you know, I always forget the number, but it's something like 230 or 240 people now. Um, the company I joined the company in 2016 and I love Paul's vision, and I just had a strong conviction about the relationship between Time series and Iot. Because if you think about it, what sensors do is they speak time, series, pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, light. They're measuring their instrumented something over time. And so I thought that would be super relevant over long term, and I've not regretted. Oh, >>no, and it's interesting at that time to go back in history. You know the role of databases are relational database, the one database to rule the world. And then, as clouds started coming in, you're starting to see more databases, proliferate types of databases. And Time series in particular, is interesting because real time has become super valuable. From an application standpoint, Iot, which speaks Time series, means something. It's like time matters >>times, >>and sometimes date is not worth it after the time. Sometimes it's worth it. And then you get the Data lake, so you have this whole new evolution. Is this the momentum? What's the momentum? I guess the question is, what's the momentum behind >>what's causing us to grow? So >>the time series. Why is time series in the category momentum? What's the bottom line? We'll >>think about it. You think about it from abroad, abroad, sort of frame, which is where what everybody's trying to do is build increasingly intelligent systems, whether it's a self driving car or a robotic system that does what you want to do or self healing software system. Everybody wants to build increasing intelligence systems, and so, in order to build these increasingly intelligence systems. You have to instrument the system well, and you have to instrument it over time, better and better. And so you need a tool, a fundamental tool to drive that instrumentation. And that's become clear to everybody that that instrumentation is all based on time. And so what happened? What happened? What happened? What's going to happen? And so you get to these applications, like predictive maintenance or smarter systems. And increasingly, you want to do that stuff not just intelligently, but fast in real time, so millisecond response, so that when you're driving a self driving car and the system realises that you're about to do something, essentially, you want to be able to act in something that looks like real time. All systems want to do that. I want to be more intelligent, and they want to be more real time. So we just happened to, you know, we happen to show up at the right time. In the evolution of the market. >>It's interesting. Near real time isn't good enough when you need real time. Yeah, >>it's not, it's not, and it's like it's like everybody wants even when you don't need it. Uh, ironically, you want it. It's like having the feature for, you know, you buy a new television, you want that one feature even though you're not going to use it, you decide that you're buying criteria. Real time is a buying criteria. >>So what you're saying, then is near real time is getting closer to real time as possible as possible. Okay, so talk about the aspect of data cause we're hearing a lot of conversations on the Cubans particular around how people are implementing and actually getting better. So iterating on data. >>But >>you have to know when it happened to get know how to fix it. So this is a big part of what we're seeing with people saying, Hey, you know, I want to make my machine learning albums better after the fact I want to learn from the data. Um, how does that How do you see that evolving? Is that one of the use cases of sensors as people bring data in off the network, getting better with the data knowing when it happened? >>Well, for sure, So for sure, what you're saying is is none of this is non linear. It's all incremental. And so if you take something, you know, just as an easy example. If you take a self driving car, what you're doing is your instrument in that car to understand where it can perform in the real world in real time. And if you do that, if you run the loop, which is I instrumented, I watch what happens. Oh, that's wrong. Oh, I have to correct for that. Correct for that in the software, if you do that four billion times, you get a self driving car. But every system moves along that evolution. And so you get the dynamic of you know of constantly instrumented, watching the system behave and do it and this and sets up driving cars. One thing. But even in the human genome, if you look at some of our customers, you know people like, you know, people doing solar arrays. People doing power walls like all of these systems, are getting smarter. >>What are the top application? What are you seeing your with Influx DB The Time series. What's the sweet spot for the application use case and some customers give some examples. >>Yeah, so it's pretty easy to understand. On one side of the equation. That's the physical side is sensors are the sensors are getting cheap. Obviously, we know that, and they're getting. The whole physical world is getting instrumented your home, your car, the factory floor, your wrist watch your healthcare, you name it. It's getting instrumented in the physical world. We're watching the physical world in real time, and so there are three or four sweet spots for us. But they're all on that side. They're all about Iot. So they're talking about consumer Iot projects like Google's Nest Tato Um, particle sensors, Um, even delivery engines like Happy who deliver the interesting part of South America. Like anywhere. There's a physical location doing that's on the consumer side. And then another exciting space is the industrial side. Factories are changing dramatically over time, increasingly moving away from proprietary equipment to develop or driven systems that run operational because what it has to get smarter when you're building, when you're building a factory, systems all have to get smarter. And then lastly, a lot in the renewables sustainability. So a lot, you know, Tesla, lucid motors, Nicola Motors, um you know, lots to do with electric cars, solar arrays, windmills are raised just anything that's going to get instrumented, that where that instrumentation becomes part of what the purpose is. >>It's interesting. The convergence of physical and digital is happening with the data Iot you mentioned. You know, you think of Iot. Look at the use cases there. It was proprietary OT systems now becoming more I p enabled Internet protocol and now edge compute getting smaller, faster, cheaper ai going to the edge. Now you have all kinds of new capabilities that bring that real time and time series opportunity. Are you seeing Iot going to a new level? What was that? What's the Iot? Where's the Iot dots connecting to? Because, you know, as these two cultures merge operations basically industrial factory car, they gotta get smarter. Intelligent edge is a buzzword, but it has to be more intelligent. Where's the where's the action in all this? So the >>action really, really at the core? >>It's >>at the developer, right, Because you're looking at these things. It's very hard to get off the shelf system to do the kinds of physical and software interaction. So the actions really happen at the developers. And so what you're seeing is a movement in the world that that maybe you and I grew up in with I t r o T moving increasingly that developer driven capability. And so all of these Iot systems, their bespoke, they don't come out of the box. And so the developer and the architect, the CTO they define what's my business? What am I trying to do trying to sequence the human genome and figure out when these genes express themselves? Or am I trying to figure out when the next heart rate monitor is going to show up in my apple watch, right? What am I trying to do? What's the system I need to build? And so starting with the developers where all of the good stuff happens here, which is different than it used to be, right, used to be used by an application or a service or a sad thing for But with this dynamic with this integration of systems, it's all about bespoke. It's all about building something. >>So let's get to the death of a real quick, real highlight point. Here is the data. I mean, I could see a developer saying, Okay, I need to have an application for the edge Iot, edge or car. I mean, we're gonna test look at applications of the cars right there. I mean, there's the modern application lifecycle now, so take us through how this impacts the developer doesn't impact their CI CD. Pipeline is a cloud native. I mean, where does this all Where does this go to? >>Well, so first of all you talking about, there was an internal journey that we had to go through as a company, which which I think is fascinating for anybody's interested as we went from primarily a monolithic software that was open source to building a cloud native platform, which means we have to move from an agile development environment to a C I C d. Environ. So two degree that you're moving your service whether it's, you know, Tesla, monitoring your car and updating your power walls right? Or whether it's a solar company updating your race right to the degree that services cloud then increasingly removed from an agile development to a CI CD environment which is shipping code to production every day. And so it's not just the developers, all the infrastructure to support the developers to run that service and that sort of stuff. I think that's also going to happen in a big way >>when your customer base that you have now and you see evolving with influx DB is it that they're gonna be writing more of the application or relying more on others? I mean, obviously the open source component here. So when you bring in kind of old way new Way Old Way was, I got a proprietary platform running all this Iot stuff and I got to write, Here's an application. That's general purpose. I have some flexibility, somewhat brittle. Maybe not a lot of robustness to it, but it does its job >>a good way to think about this. >>This is what >>So, yeah, a good way to think about this is what What's the role of the developer slashed architect C T o that chain within a large enterprise or a company. And so, um, the way to think about is I started my career in the aerospace industry, and so when you look at what Boeing does to assemble a plane, they build very, very few of the parts instead. What they do is they assemble, they buy the wings, they buy the engines they assemble. Actually, they don't buy the wings. It's the one thing they buy, the material of the way they build the wings because there's a lot of tech in the wings and they end up being assemblers, smart assemblers of what ends up being a flying aeroplane, which is pretty big deal even now. And so what happens with software people is they have the ability to pull from, you know, the best of the open source world, so they would pull a time series capability from us. Then they would assemble that with potentially some E t l logic from somebody else, or they assemble it with, um, a Kafka interface to be able to stream the data in. And so they become very good integrators and assemblers. But they become masters of that bespoke application, and I think that's where it goes because you're not writing native code for everything, >>so they're more flexible. They have faster time to market because they're assembling way faster and they get to still maintain their core competency. OK, the wings. In this case, >>they become increasingly not just coders, but designers and developers. They become broadly builders is what we like to think of it. People who started build stuff. By the way. This is not different than the people have just up the road Google have been doing for years or the tier one Amazon building all their own. >>Well, I think one of the things that's interesting is that this idea of a systems developing a system architecture, I mean systems, uh, systems have consequences when you make changes. So when you have now cloud data centre on premise and edge working together, how does that work across the system? You can't have a wing that doesn't work with the other wing. That's exactly >>that's where that's where the, you know that that Boeing or that aeroplane building analogy comes in for us. We've really been thoughtful about that because I o. T. It's critical. So are open Source Edge has the same API as our cloud native stuff that hasn't enterprise on premises or multiple products have the same API, and they have a relationship with each other. They can talk with each other, so the builder builds at once. And so this is where when you start thinking about the components that people have to use to build these services is that you want to make sure at least that base layer that database layer that those components talk to each other. >>We'll have to ask you. I'm the customer. I put my customer hat on. Okay. Hey, I'm dealing with a lot. >>I mean, you have appeal for >>a big check blank check. If you can answer this question only if you get the question right. I got all this important operation stuff. I got my factory. I got my self driving cars. This isn't like trivial stuff. This is my business. How should I be thinking about Time Series? Because now I have to make these architectural decisions as you mentioned and it's going to impact my application development. So huge decision point for your customers. What should I care about the most? What's in it for me? Why is time series important? Yeah, >>that's a great question. So chances are if you've got a business that was 20 years old or 25 years old, you're already thinking about Time series. You probably didn't call it that you built something on a work call or you build something that IBM db two. Right, and you made it work within your system, right? And so that's what you started building. So it's already out there. There are, you know, they're probably hundreds of millions of Time series applications out there today. But as you start to think about this increasing need for real time and you start to think about increasing intelligence, you think about optimising those systems over time. I hate the word but digital transformation, and you start with Time series. It's a foundational base layer for any system that you're going to build. There's no system I can think of where time series shouldn't be the foundational base layer. If you just want to store your data and just leave it there and then maybe look it up every five years, that's fine. That's not time. Serious time series when you're building a smarter, more intelligent, more real time system, and the developers now know that, and so the more they play a role in building these systems, the more obvious it becomes. >>And since I have a P o for you in a big check, what what's the value to me as like when I implement this What's the end state? What's it look like when it's up and running? What's the value proposition for me? What's in it? >>So when it's up and running, you're able to handle the queries, the writing of the data, the down sampling of the data transforming it in near real time. So the other dependencies that a system that gets for adjusting a solar array or trading energy off of a power wall or some sort of human genome those systems work better. So time series is foundational. It's not like it's, you know, it's not like it's doing every action that's above, but it's foundational to build a really compelling intelligence system. I think that's what developers and architects are seeing now. >>Bottom line. Final word. What's in it for the customer? What's what's your What's your statement of the customer? Would you say to someone looking to do something in time, series and edge? >>Yeah. So it's pretty clear to clear to us that if you're building, if you view yourself as being in the building business of building systems that you want them to be increasingly intelligent, self healing, autonomous, you want them to operate in real time that you start from Time series. I also want to say What's in it for us in flux? What's in it for us is people are doing some amazing stuff. I highlighted some of the energy stuff, some of the human genome, some of the health care. It's hard not to be proud or feel like. Wow. Somehow I've been lucky. I've arrived at the right time in the right place, with the right people to be able to deliver on that. That's That's also exciting on our side of the equation. >>It's critical infrastructure, critical critical operations. >>Yeah, great >>stuff. Evan. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate this segment. All right. In a moment. Brian Gilmore, director of Iot and emerging Technology that influx, they will join me. You're watching the Cube leader in tech coverage. Thanks for watching