>>Modernizing applications can be a complicated situation. For many folks, it's useful to have some best practices and tangible steps that can remove friction and yield some quick wins. We're now joined by couch based CTO, Ravi meam, who will cover how organizations can approach application modernization, what role the cloud plays and what you need to know about building a business case. Ravi, welcome back to the cube. Good to see you again. >>Very good to see you. Thanks for having me, Dave. >>Yes, our pleasure. Uh, according to a recent couch based digital transformation survey that you guys ran, it was about a 650 respondents, CIOs, CTOs, et cetera. The inertia of legacy technology held back according to the respondents, 82% of enterprises from modernizing their portfolios in 2021. So I wanna talk about the what and the why of modernization. Robbie, what does application modernization mean to you and why is it top of mind for organizations? >>Yeah, I think there have been multiple forces at work here for a while and they have all come to a tipping point with, uh, the pandemic and, uh, uh, it's a combination of factors and, uh, the legacy technologies were built for a different generation of applications. So it's a generational shift that we are undergoing. Uh, part of it is the, the consumption model, which is all cloud based and pay as you go kinda stuff. The other is edge is in the middle of a lot of these conversations together with, uh, the velocity variety, um, of data that you have to actually sort of consume and results that you need to produce. These were all not what the, sort of the, the infrastructure of hold on, which the applications were built on, uh, uh, stand for. So the infrastructure, the substrate requires modernization, uh, in order for the businesses to transform themselves, that's, what's going on. >>We call it digital transformation from a technology perspective, but it's businesses that are transforming, uh, the business models, uh, in front of our eyes. Uh, you know, we have seen the media go from, uh, set up boxes to streaming everywhere, um, like that every business eCommerce has changed, uh, the way we sort of, uh, do any business gaming has changed, uh, the, the banking industry, the healthcare, everything is changing, uh, in terms of the fundamental movement, if you, if you could, uh, sort of say that is to reach the consumer directly and sort of dis intermediate intermediaries. And in that process, the technologies that we had used to build the, the, you know, last previous generation of applications, no longer scale, no longer a nimble enough, uh, no longer cater to the modern, uh, the needs of the modern data and the infrastructure on which, uh, we are standing of these applications. So that's, what's driving the modernization effort. And, uh, in, in that, uh, you know, we have always started say that few years ago, that data is the new oil. Um, so that plays a very critical role in how the data silos and infrastructure that enterprises have is what's holding them back. And, uh, this whole effort is, uh, in, in, in terms of modernizing that infrastructure, uh, through the modern means of, uh, uh, the cloud computing, uh, the modern serverless architectures and microservices, and, uh, the edge and AI play play an important role in this. >>So we're gonna hear later from Amdocs, uh, about their modernization and where couch base helps and fits, but I'd love to hear your perspective as to how couch base helps organizations modernize. >>Right. I think one of the, uh, uh, fundamental things that has happened is that in the last 30, 40 odd years, the data infrastructure has sort of become, uh, a sprawl. Uh, we had built multiple systems, uh, uh, relational databases, cash is, uh, search systems, analytical systems, uh, all, uh, requiring for us to move the data, uh, from one system to the other, in order for you to get the value from those. And this is basically what we call as a data sprawl or database sprawl. And this leads to so many sort of, uh, downstream effects all the way from, uh, data not being available, uh, at the time when the engagement, uh, when the customer is engaged to data governance, security and all those issues, because the threat surface area is wide. And now you're putting all this infrastructure on the modern sort of cloud computing paradigm and, and the costs are sort of ballooning. >>And, uh, because those older infrastructures that were built, uh, when you deploy them on the cloud, uh, it, it creates its ads to the, uh, the complexity of this brawl and on top of the, the cost of this. So, uh, a system like couch base is what, um, uh, simplifies this brawl for, uh, our customers. And it is built for the modern, uh, sort of requirements of scale and performance, low latency, and the flexibility, uh, of being able to sort of not have to go through this whole sort of cycle of whenever you have to have a, a change in your application that touches your data, uh, that it, it actually creates a huge tool in those upgrades and all those life cycle having to CA carry pagers. Uh, I mean, that doesn't work anymore in these days of, I know, five, nine up times and, uh, 24 7, 365 availability of, uh, your services, uh, is so in that area is where couch base sort of helps, uh, our customers to modernize, uh, their sort of data infrastructure. >>It, uh, fuses, um, the multiple technologies that were spread across, uh, into one platform. So it gives a, a simpler programming paradigm, uh, that is one way to scale manage, administer, uh, patch, upgrade. All that mechanism is sort of not just thought through and automated, but it also sort of centralized this, uh, whole thing simplifies at the end of the day, uh, that total task of managing, uh, because that the volume of data that you have to manage now is, you know, orders of magnitude three to four orders of magnitude more than, uh, what it was just a few years ago. And, uh, so in that, uh, containing the sprawl, uh, agility of development, uh, are, are sort of, and the simplicity of deployment and management are some of the key capabilities that, uh, enterprises look to us to solve. And in that, bringing in all the way from cloud to multi-cloud to edge, uh, is how this sort of strategy evolves for enterprises. >>So square this circle for me, cuz in the panel we just had, there's a lot of agreement with what you just said, lift and shift of legacy platforms, doesn't work. Uh, it might work for the cloud vendor to get the data in the cloud, but it generally doesn't work for the customer. And you mentioned sprawl, we talked about this in the panel about, you know, data by its very nature is distributed. We talked about data mesh. There's a lot of skepticism around data mesh, but that that's cool. And you mentioned edge, so yes, I'm interested in the cloud's role here is the idea that you're actually putting all this stuff in one place. How does that fit with the edge? Maybe you could help us understand you're thinking of that and where the cloud fits. >>Yes. Um, you know, it's about, uh, centralizing a data up to a point and decentralizing it's in the magic of how you actually enable that. Um, uh, for example, just your traffic signal, your car, uh, or if you're on a cruise ship, each one is an edge, they all generate petabytes of data. And then you basically, uh, you can consume that, but if you're gonna stream all this data to a centralized place like a cloud that's, uh, you know, most of the data actually is not something that you're gonna store forever. Those are, you know, topical and that information is required at the edge. You should synthesize that information and take the noise from it and discard the signal. So that's where the edge, uh, typically the edge is not some, you know, personal device alone or uh, uh, or a IOT sensor sending data that is also, uh, sort of, uh, one, one element of the edge, but the edge is about decentralizing the cloud. >>So to say, so you can have mul your topologies of not having all your data sit in the cloud centralize someplace behind five firewalls. So when your application tries to reach that all the latency comes into place. So that's what you want to, uh, decentralize and have the data available as close to the engagement of the data with the consumer of it. So in that is the decentralization strategy where you can have multiple techologies, a three, a mesh, uh, however you choose to so that you get to get the data closest. Um, it could be a mobile device. Uh, it could be a, a smaller deployment of a server. It could be, uh, uh, a personal electronic device like watch, or it could be all the way in the IOT gateway. These are the various sort of decentralization of the data that has to happen. >>So it's about moving the data fastest. It's almost like CDN of the data is what, uh, sorry. Uh, for those it's, um, content delivery network is what CDN stands for, where we used to actually move static content in the good old days. That's what made, made our webpages faster. Now we can actually move live data that much faster by using replication technology. So when you move the data towards, towards the edge, what you're trying to do is bring that data closer, uh, to the compute where it's actually happening, as opposed to keeping the data centralized someplace back in the cloud and server and all your application logic is actually sitting on the device or on the edge. So you're constantly, uh, shoveling the data from the cloud to the edge, from edge to the cloud at the time of compute, as opposed to having it available at the time of, uh, um, the consumption of the data. >>That's where the paradigm, uh, shift is actually happening. And, uh, this basically is not about better user experience. It's also about backend networking, other costs that you can actually, uh, gain from, by not having to sort of repeatedly sort of shovel data back and forth. So that's stage strategy that, uh, enterprises are adopting. Now, this is become so to say core part of the architecture of modernization, uh, uh, in terms of where everybody can see this has to move to and, uh, our edge and mobile product, um, also plays a role in, uh, that's one of the other elements aspects of it that customers to look us, uh, look to us >>For. So it's a balance and couch base can play in both places. A lot of the data, if I heard you correctly at the edge is ephemeral, but if I want to do, you know, AI inferencing in real time, I gotta do it at the edge. I can't send it back to the cloud and, and, and do the modeling, you know, post-proces, that's not gonna work. All right, let's talk about the business case, you know, we've, we we've hit on the what and the why, but, you know, how does it get paid for companies sometimes struggle to plan for and budget appropriately for their outcomes? Yes. What do customers need to know about how do they get this past the CFO's office for, in the other business decision makers? >>I think there is an opportunity cost, uh, with the sort of lack of modernization, uh, if, uh, people are doing their classic sort of, so to say it style budgeting, uh, then it will just look like we have to modernize, uh, you know, some older infrastructure. It's not about that. It's about modernizing or making your business relevant, uh, to, uh, to the consumers, because the way consumers, uh, go about consuming your services now is very different from the way you had originally imagined and built for. And in that lies the, the, the transformation, uh, not to see this as a, it, uh, just as an it infrastructure modernization, but more from the standpoint of business transformation and, uh, the tooling that is required for this business transformation to be successful. So it requires the involvement of, um, not leaving it to just, you know, uh, uh, it oriented sort of, uh, uh, thinking of modernizing, but from the standpoint of looking at the, the, the business and what are the transformations that they need to, if they don't keep up with the Jones, they, in this digital divide, they may find themselves in the sort of either the wrong side or in the chasm. >>So I think that mindset, uh, that I was, uh, sort of in addition to sort of, uh, it pushing for this, uh, it's got to have a C-suite, uh, sponsorship understanding and, uh, sort of champion of this, then those initiatives will succeed because, uh, it's not just the technology transformation. It is accompanied by business and sort of, so to say cultural transformation inside the enterprise. >>Yeah. And it's interesting in the survey, it was very much it, you know, survey, I get that and, and the, it pros, the CIOs, et cetera, felt that, that, that, that the it organization was largely responsible for the digital strategy. And I think that was largely a function of, we just came out of the, the pandemic or Hopely coming out of the pandemic. And so they had all these tactical needs, but now you're saying step back, align with the business, make sure the C suite's involved, and that's gonna reduce the friction of, of getting this stuff paid for. >>Correct. And, you know, the, uh, this observation was also there. If you, I must have noticed that, you know, many, uh, of these sort of transf strategies, if you just leave it to like an it thing, they end up being reactive. Uh, but the proactive strategies are the one that actually, uh, succeed because they understand that this is a sort of enterprise transformation. It could be disruptive. Uh, it is what is required for the enterprise to get to the, uh, to the next level, uh, or to be, uh, in this, to be relevant in this sort of modern economy, if you would. So I think that is what, uh, what people are reacting to is the fact that this pandemic has pushed people to modernize quickly. And that may have happened as a reaction to the reality of the situation, but more and more, uh, uh, even among these strategies and more and more initiatives that people are taking, they may have sort of a longer term sort of thinking in this, uh, that requires the, uh, definitely without it's not gonna succeed and they're gonna be in the middle and they'll be, uh, in the forefront of many technology decisions that we have to make, but having a, a C-suite level sponsorship. >>In addition to that, with the impetus of what is the business transformation, this is actually going to achieve, um, those you will see will succeed a lot more because otherwise you, we see that, you know, good, good number of what 80% of these projects fail or, or, or they suffer delays or scale back or never get started, uh, because, you know, uh, the understanding of what is the business value of it is perhaps not, not clearly articulated instead, it just becomes a, a technology modernization conversation without that company benefit. >>Yeah. Got it. Okay. Uh, you guys recently announced some updates to your platform. Can you run us through the, the highlights, you know, what the customers get and, and how it relates to this conversation modernizing application strategies? >>Yes. So, uh, well, we will be, uh, releasing our couch base server 7.1. And, uh, that is what will be the sort of underneath platform for our, the couch base, uh, Capella, which is the, our DBA both, uh, have exciting innovations, um, that we would be putting out. Uh, let me just run through a few things, uh, on the, uh, uh, couch based server seven one, because there are some, uh, amazing, uh, capabilities we have introduced there. We are really excited about the opportunities. This brings couch based into play. Uh, first is we have a, uh, a brand new storage engine that we put in there, which, uh, significant significantly, uh, reduces the, uh, the cost of running couch base. Uh, with this capability, we can actually consume lot less memory and that's, that is like a 10 X improvement on this one. So from that standpoint, we are 10 X more efficient in terms of resource consumption, the expensive memory oriented resource consumption. >>This now allows couch based to sort of not just cater to those high performance, um, you know, hyperscale scenarios that we are known for, but also the more, the classic BIS oriented, uh, applications, which are not that performance sensitive, but they're more cost sensitive. So that's a huge, uh, step forward for couch base because there are a lot more, uh, opportunities where sort of, we become, uh, that much more, uh, cost efficient for enterprises to run. And this is something that, uh, many enterprises have asked for, and we know, uh, many more use cases where we would be more relevant with that innovation. And this has been a, a sort of a long journey building storage engines is, uh, you know, uh, is a very difficult Endover. And we took that on knowing that, uh, what we can achieve here would be a game changer, uh, for couch base. >>And in terms of how, uh, uh, the consolidation of multiple things that you can do in our platform just got this sort of boost of being able to do a lot more with lot less resources. In addition to that, we have done enhancements to our analytics service, uh, with, uh, the work that we have done there. Uh, it, it can sort of do a lot more, um, uh, availability, uh, of the, of, of the analytics service, uh, which, uh, will strengthens the analytics side of the product, which now allows you to run analysis O on J O uh, straight up without requiring the operational side of the, uh, the database. So you can just simply do, uh, straight off analytics stuff, because it, it, it can now, uh, give you the higher availability and disaster recovery that you would want if you're gonna depend on these, uh, systems with that, we are done over some, uh, real good work with Tableau integration, which makes it easy to visualize this, um, uh, uh, and, uh, one other important capability we introduce here is the, um, on, in the entire platform is what we call as user defined functions. >>This now allows us to write custom logic and Java script in the server couch based server. This is, this helps you write procedural logic in the middle of, uh, SQL queries, which is a humongous capability that, you know, and the classical systems process. Now, with that, we have closed the gap. If you know, how to program to sort of classical operational systems, pretty much, you have one to one equivalence of that, uh, in couch. So if you come from the good relational world, uh, it would be very easy breeze for you to understand how to program in this modern, no SQL systems, which both supports, um, uh, SQL as well as the classic asset transaction capabilities. And last, uh, we expanded the support two arm processors, and typically, uh, arm processes, at least save you quarter of, uh, your budget because of it being that much more, uh, uh, cost efficient in terms of, uh, its operational and power capabilities. >>So with that net net, uh, couch based server becomes a lot more, um, uh, cost efficient. And at the same time, it also in one, well becomes that database server, which can both handle your in memory, uh, capabilities that, that speed and hyperscale, as well as, uh, the classical use cases of being, uh, disk, uh, disoriented, uh, classical relational database use cases. Nice. So that, that, that rounds out our offering, it's been a long journey for us to get here from being the high performance, uh, low latency system to, uh, the classical database use case >>Assessment. Yeah. I mean, that's great. You got, you got memory optimization, you mentioned the, the, the, the arm base. Now you're on that curve, which is great software companies love when you get cheaper, faster hardware, uh, you making it easy to speak the language of, you know, traditional stuff. So that's awesome. Um, you and I, you mentioned, uh, Capella, you and I talked about, yes, at couch base connects Capella. You've been moving hard with your DBA strategy, how's it going? And then beyond these announcements, what's what should we look for from couch base? >>You know, uh, our fundamental, uh, mission is to make the developer experience, um, that much more easier, that much, uh, to move all the frictions that, that has existed for developers to adopt couch base. And, uh, the Capella strategy is to leverage the cloud. So you have number one, the ease of development, just bring your browsers, start to learn, develop even simple sample applications and deploy them from there. You can scale, and you can have production level deployments, that whole journey of a developer, along with the ability to sort of have your a, you know, metered billing and pay as you go, uh, uh, pricing, uh, so that it becomes easier for developers to sort of consume this and, uh, show the value of what they can build here. That is our, um, sort of journey of bringing it closer, uh, to our developers and make it simpler for them to sort of, uh, get started and build the, the mission critical applications that they have trusted to build on couch base, to become that much more simpler, faster, and easier for them. So that's the journey. So that's the kind of announcements you will see coming out in Capella. And for that this, this seven one server is, is the platform on which we, we are sort of adding those capabilities to make a Capella that much easier for developers to adopt >>Outstanding. You've been busy and it looks like you've got a lot of value. Yes. All right, we're gonna have to leave it there. Robbie, up next, we bring on the customer perspective with Amdocs. They've got a real world example of a modernization journey that they go through. They had to modernize legacy Oracle WebLogic infrastructure with a microservices architecture, and of course, couch base, keep it right there. You're watching the cube.