>>Welcome everyone. I'm Dave Nicholson with the cube. This is a special Q conversation. That is part of the AWS startup showcase. Season two. Got a very interesting conversation on deck with Steve Francis who joins us from Instaclustr. Steve is the chief revenue officer and executive vice president for go-to-market operations for Insta cluster. Steve, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you, Dave. Good to be here. >>It looks like you're on a, uh, you're you're you're coming to us from an exotic locale. Or do you just like to have a nautical theme in your office? >>No, I'm actually on my boat. I have lots of kids at home and, uh, it can be very noisy. So, uh, we call this our apartment in the city and sometimes when we need a quiet place, this, this does nicely >>Well, fantastic. Well, let's, let's talk about Instaclustr. Um, first give us, give us a primmer on Instaclustr and, uh, and what you guys do. And then let's double click on that and go into some of the details. >>Sure. So in sip cluster, we offer a SAS platform for data layer, open source technologies. And what those technologies have in common is they scale massively. We re curate technologies that are capable of massive scale. So people use them to solve big problems typically. And so in addition to SAS offerings for those open source projects where people can provision themselves clusters in minutes, um, we also offer support for all of the technologies that we offer on our SAS platform. We offer our customer support contracts as well. And then we have a consulting team, a global consulting team who are expert in all of those open source projects that can help with implementations that can help with design health checks, uh, you name it. So most of what they do is kind of short term expert engagements, but we've also done longer-term projects with them as well. >>So your business model is to be a SAS provider as opposed to an alternative, which would be to, uh, provide what's referred to as, uh, open core software. Is that, is that right? >>Yeah, that's exactly right. So you, so when, when our customers have an interest in using community open source, we're the right partner for them. And so, you know, really what that means is if they, whether it's our SAS platform, if, if they want the flexibility to say, we want to take that workload off of your SAS platform, maybe at some point operated ourselves because we're not throwing a bunch of PROPRICER proprietary stuff in there. They have the flexibility to do that. So they always have an exit ramp without being locked in and with our support customers, of course, it's very easy. What we support is both the open source project. And if there's a gap in that open source project, what we'll do is rather than create a proprietary piece of software to close the gap, we'll source something from the community and we'll support that. Or if it, or if something does not exist in the community, in many cases, we'll write it ourselves and open source it and then, and then support it. >>Yeah, it's interesting. Uh, supposedly Henry Ford made a comment once that if you ask customers what they want, they'll tell you they want a faster horse, uh, but he was inventing the automobile and some people have, have likened open core to sort of the faster mechanical horse version of open source where you're essentially substituting an old school legacy vendor for a new school vendor. That's wrapping their own proprietary stuff around a delicious core of open source, but it sort of diminishes the value proposition of open source. It sounds like that's, that's the philosophy that you have adopted at this point. That's >>I love that story. I haven't heard that before. One that I like, uh, you know, matching metaphor for metaphor, uh, is, uh, the, um, is the Luddites, right? You know, the Luddites didn't want to lose their weaving jobs. And so they would smash weeding looms and, um, you know, to, to protect their reading jobs. And I think it's the same thing with the open core model they're protecting, uh, you know, they're creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about open, open sourcing. Oh, it isn't secure. And, you know, the, those, those arguments have been used for 15 years or 20 years. And, you know, maybe 15 years ago there were some truth to it. But when you look at who is using open source community open source now for huge projects, you know, if you just do a search for Apache coffee users and go to the Apache Apache website, you know, it's kind of the who's who in big business, and these are people using community open source. And so, um, a lot of the fear and uncertainty and doubt is still used, and it's just, you know, it's just kind of hanging on to a business model that isn't really it's for the benefit of the, of the vendor and not the benefit of the customer. >>Well, so I can imagine being a customer and realizing several years into an open core journey that I basically painted myself into a similar corner that I was in before. Um, and so I can see where that, you know, that can be something that is a realization that, that creeps up over time from a customer perspective, but from your business model perspective, um, if I'm understanding correctly, your, when you scale, you're scaling the ability to, um, take over operations for our customer, uh, that, that some level, I'm sure you've got automation involved in this. Uh, but at some level you've got to scale in terms of really smart people, um, has that limited your ability to scale. So first talk about what have the results been. You guys we've been covering you since 2018. What have your results been over time and has that sort of limited that that limit to your scalability, uh, been an issue at all. >>It's hard to find people, uh, it's hard, it's hard for our customers to find people and it's hard for us to find people. So we have an advantage for two reasons. Number one, we have a really good process for hiring people, hiring graduates, recent computer science graduates typically, and then getting them trained up and productive on our platform and within a pretty short timeframe of three or four months. And, um, you know, so we we've, we've, uh, we have a really well-proven process to do that. And then the other thing that you've already alluded to is automation, right? There's a ton of automation built into our platform. So we have a big cost advantage over our customers. So, you know, our, our customers, you know, if they want to go hire a seasoned, you know, Kafka person or PostGrest personal work, a person, these people are incredibly expensive in the market, but for us, we can get those people for relatively less expensive. And then with the automation that we have built into our platform to do all the operational tasks and handle all the operational burdens on those different open source projects, it's a lot of it's automated. And so, uh, you know, where one of our experts can use, you know, the number of workloads that they can operate is usually, you know, many times more than what someone could do without all of the operational capability or all the automated capabilities that we have. >>So what has your, what is your plan for scaling the business look like into the future? Is it a additional investment in those core operators? Uh, are you looking at, uh, uh, expansion, geographically acquisition? What, what can you share with us? >>We've done some acquisition. We added a Postgres capability. We recently added a last, further Alaska search capability and really buttressed our capabilities there. I think we'll do more of that. And, um, we, we will continue to add technologies that we find interesting and, and federal model, usually what we look for technologies that are pretty popular. They're used to solve big problems and they're complicated to manage, right? If something's easy to manage, people are less likely to perceive our value to be that great. So we look for things that, um, you know, are we kind of take the biggest areas, gnarliest, um, open-source projects for people to manage, and we handle the heavy lifting. >>Well, can you give me an example of something like that? You don't have to, you don't have to share a customer name if you don't, if it's not appropriate, but give us a, give us an example of, of Instaclustr inaction pretend I'm the customer. And, uh, and, uh, you know, you mentioned elastic search. Let's say that, let's say that that is absolutely something that's involved. And I have a choice between some open, open core solution and throwing my people at it to manage it, uh, and, and, and operate at the data layer, uh, versus what you would do. What does that interaction look like? How do, how does the process, >>Um, so one thing that we hear from elastic search customers a lot is, uh, their customers, some of them are unhappy. And what they'll tell us is look, when we get an operational problem with Alaska search, we go to Alaska search. And the answer we get from them is we gotta buy, you know, you gotta buy more stuff, you got to add more nodes, and they're in the business of, uh, you know, that's, that's our business. And, uh, you know, they do have a SAS offering, but, um, you know, they're, they're also in the business of selling software. And so when those customers, those same customers come to us, our answer is often, well, Hey, we can help you optimize your environment. And, you know, a lot of times when we onboard people into our platform, they'll achieve cost savings because maybe they weren't on the cloud. Maybe they weren't completely optimized there. And, um, you know, we want to make sure that they get a good operational experience and that's how we felt lock customers in, right. We don't lock them in with code. We make sure that they have a positive experience that we take a lot of that operational stuff off their hands. And so there's just a good natural alignment between what we want to provide that customer and what they ultimately want to consume. Uh, you know, that, that alignment I think is, is uniquely high within our business. >>Well, so how, how have things changed just in the last several years? Obviously, I mean, you know, the, the pandemic has, has affected everything in, in one way or another, but, but in terms of things that live at the data layer being important, um, I mean, just in the last three or four years, the talk of various messaging interfaces and databases has shifted to a degree. Um, what do you see on the horizon? What's, what's, what's, what's getting buzz that maybe didn't get buzz a year ago. What, what, what are you looking for as well? If you're out looking for people with skill sets right now, what are those skill sets you're hiring to? >>I don't hire engineers, right. I run the go to market organization. I hire marketers, salespeople, consultants, but, uh, so it's probably different. I'm maybe not the best person to ask from an engineering standpoint, but, uh, your question about the data layer, um, and how, you know, that's evolving trends that we see it's becoming increasingly strategic. You know, every, there's a couple of buzzwords out there that, you know, for years now, people have been talking about, um, modernization, digital transformation, stuff like that, but, you know, there's, there's a lot to it like digital, you know, every business kind of needs to become a digital business. And as that happens, the amount of data that's produced is, is just as mushrooming, right. You know, the amount of data on the planet doubles about every two years. And so for a lot of applications for a lot of enterprise mission-critical applications, data is the most expensive layer of the application. >>You know, much more expensive than delivering a front end, much more expensive than delivering a military when you just, when you factor in storage, um, uh, just the kind of moving data in and out, you know, data transfer fees, the cost of engineering resources that it's, it's incredibly expensive. So data layers are becoming strategic because organizations are looking at it and realizing, you know, the amount that they're spending on this is eye-popping. And so that's why it's becoming strategic. It's on the radar, just due to the, uh, the size of bills that organizations are looking at. Um, and we could drive those bills down. You know, our value proposition is really simpler. It's a better, faster, cheaper, and we eliminate the license fees. We can, you know, we are operational experts, so we can get people architected in the cloud more efficiently, and probably about a third of the time we save our customers cloud fees. Um, so it's, you know, it's a pretty simple model that some of those things that are strategically more, or are there, sorry, traditionally more tactical or becoming strategic, just because of the scope and scale of them. >>We, uh, we're having this conversation as part of the AWS startup showcase, which basically means that AWS said, Hey, Silicon angle, have your cube guys go talk to these people because we think they're cool. So, um, so why, why, why do they think you're cool? Are you a wholly owned subsidiary of AWS? Did you, did you and your family, uh, uh, exceed the 300 order, uh, Amazon threshold last year? Y what's your relationship with Amazon? >>I bought an elf on the shelf from, I don't know, I don't know why. Um, you know, we're, we're growing fast and we're, we're growing north of 50% last year in 21 and closer to 60%. Um, you know, we certainly, I think, uh, when our customers sign up for our services, you know, Amazon gets more workloads. That's, that's probably a positive thing for Amazon. Um, we're certainly not, you know, there's much, much, much bigger vendors and partners than us that they have, but, uh, but you know, they're, I think they're aware that there's, there's some, some of the smaller vendors like us will grow up to be, you know, the, you know, the bigger vendors of tomorrow. Um, but they've kind of, they've been a great partner. You know, we, we support multiple, we do support multiple clouds, and Amazon's cool with that. You know, we support GCP, we support Azure and kind of give our customers the choice of what clouds they want to run on. Uh, most of our customers do run an Amazon that seems to be sort of a defacto standard, but, um, they haven't been a great partner, >>But, but AWS, it's not a dependency. Uh, if you're, if you're working within the cluster, it doesn't mean that you must be in AWS. >>Nope. We can support customers. Uh, that's a great question. So we can support customers and multiple clouds, and we even support them on prem, right? If they, if organizations that have their own data center, we actually have an on-premise managed service offering. And if that's not a fit, we even have, um, we can offer support contracts, like if they want to do it themselves and do a lot of the heavy lifting and just need sort of a red phone for emergency situations. Uh, we offer 24 by 7, 365 support with 20 minutes service levels for urgent issues. >>So your chief revenue officer, that means that you write the code that runs operations in your system. I'm not smiling, but I'm at, but I'm, but I am actually joking. So that's what the dry sense of humor. Uh, but, but, but seriously, let's talk about the business end of this, right? We have, uh, we have a lot of folks who, uh, who tuned into the queue because of the technology aspect of it, but let's talk about your, your growth trajectory over time. Um, uh, this isn't a drill down. I'm not asking for your, your pipeline, Steve, but, uh, but, but, you know, give us an idea of what that trajectory has looked like. Um, what's going on. >>Yeah. I mean the most recent year, you know, we're, we're getting, uh, to be, um, I, I don't know what I'm permitted to share expect, but I, you know, we've, we've had a lot of growth, you know, if we've won a couple, a couple of hundred percent, our revenue has in the amount of time that I've been here, which is three years, and we're the point now, or pretty good size. Uh, and that gives us, uh, it's cool. It's exciting. You know, we're, we're noticing in the market is people who traded two years ago. People, no one knew who we were. And now we're beginning to talk to some partners, some resellers, some customers, and they will say things like, oh yeah, we've heard of you. We didn't know what you did, but we've heard of you. And, you know, that's, that's fun. That's a great place to be. Uh, you know, it becomes a little bit self-sustaining at that point. And, um, we, you know, we are about to launch, I, it's not a secret because this isn't public preview. So I think >>Was there, I noticed the pause where you're like, can I say this or not? Go ahead and say, go ahead and say, >>Really we, uh, I was trying to think, wait, am I revealing anything here? I shouldn't. But, uh, we did just go public preview, uh, probably a month ago with a project called Aiden's, uh, cadence workflow. Uh, you can actually, um, go to the Instaclustr website and look up cadence. Um, it's run their homepage, or you can, if you want to go to the open source project itself, you can go to cadence, workflow.io. Uh, this is a project that's trending pretty highly on Google. It's got a lot of important movers in the technology business that are using it and having a lot of success with it. Uh, and we're going to be first to market globally with a SAS offering for cadence, port flop. And, um, it's an incredibly exciting project. And it's exciting for us to specifically, because it's a little different, right? It's not, it's a middle tier project that is targeted at developers to increase developer productivity and developer velocity. >>Um, you joked about my being a CRO writing code, but I actually used to be a coder long time ago. I was not very good at it, but what I did enough of it to remember that a lot of what I did as a coder was right. Plumbing code, you know, rather than writing that code that makes the business application function a huge amount of my time as a developer was spent writing, you know, just the plumbing code to make things work and to make it secure and to make a transactional and just all that, you know, kind of nitty gritty code that you gotta do in a nutshell, cadence makes writing that code way easier. So especially for distributed applications that have workflow like capabilities requirements, uh, it's a massive productivity and PR increaser. So it's cool. Exciting for us is now we can, rather than just target data operators, we can actually target developers and engage, not just at the data layer, but kind of at that middle tier as well, and begin to, uh, identify and, um, uh, synergies between the different services that we have and, and our customers will obviously benefit from that. >>So that's a big part of our growth strategy. >>Yeah. So more, more on from a business perspective and a go to market perspective. Um, what is your, what is your go to market strategy or, uh, do you have, do you have a channel strategy? Are you working with partners? >>He is pretty nascent. You know, our go to market strategy for the most part has been, you know, we, uh, pay the Google gods and, and lots of people come to our website and say, they want to talk to us. You know, we talked to them and we get them signed up with, uh, uh, on our, our, our SAS platform or with a support contract or with our consulting team. Um, we also do outbound, you know, we do, we have an inside sales team that does outbound prospecting and we have, um, and we also have some self-service. We have some, some self service customers as well that just, you know, anyone can go to our website, swipe a credit card, sign up for one of our SAS offering and begin, literally get fired up in minutes and PR and using the platform. Uh, so, you know, it's a bit of a mix of high touch, low touch, I think are, you know, we have tons of big logos. >>We know lots and lots of our customers are household name, really big organizations solving big problems. And, um, that's kind of where the bulk of our businesses. And so I think we've been a little more focused there and go to market than we have sort of a know startup selling to startups and the people that just from super developer focused, wanting low touch. So, but I think we need to do better at that part of the market. And we are investing some resources there so that, you know, we're not so lopsided at the high end of the market. We want kind of a, more of a balanced approach because, you know, some of those, some of those, um, younger companies are going to grow up to be big massively successful companies. We've had that, you know, door dash is a tough class, has been a customer of ours for years, and they were not nearly, you know, we, there were a prepayment, there were custom bars, pre pandemic, and we all know what happened to them, uh, during the pandemic. And so, you know, we know there's other door dashes out there. >>Yeah. Yeah. Uh, uh, final question, geography, uh, you guys global. I, uh, I know you're in north America, but, um, what, what, what does that look like for you? Where are you at? >>We're super global. So, you know, in my go-to-market organization, we have sellers in, um, uh, AsiaPac and Europe, you know, multiple in Asia, multiple in Europe, uh, you know, lots of lots in the, in the states, uh, same with marketing, uh, same with engineering, same with our tech ops delivery team. We have most of them, uh, in Australia, which is where we were founded. Uh, but we also have a pretty good sized team, uh, out of Boston and, um, kind of a nascent team, uh, in India as well, to help to tell it, to help them out. So yeah, very much global and, um, you know, getting close to 300 employees, um, you know, when I started, I think we're about 85 to 90, >>That's it, that's an exciting growth trajectory. And, uh, I'm just going to assume, because it just feels awesome to assume it that since you're on a boat and since you were founded in Australia, that that's how you go back and forth to, uh, to visit the most. >>Yeah. Yeah. It takes a while. It takes a while. >>So with that, Steve, I want to say a smooth sailing and, uh, and, uh, thanks for joining us here on the cube. I'm Dave Nicholson. Uh, this has been part of the AWS startup showcase my conversation with Steve Francis of Instaclustr again. Thanks Steve. Stay tuned. >>Thanks very much to you, >>Your source for hybrid tech coverage.

>> For years, the database market was steady, and steadily boring. As virtualization went mainstream, organizations began to rethink their database strategies and ask questions like, "should I run Postgres and VMware?" Now implicit in that question was another drill down question. In other words, can VMware itself handle my critical applications and is PostGres the right solution to optimize my infrastructure estate. Now history has shown that was both a safe and good bet for organizations looking to leverage open source innovation and lower their costs. At the same time, new workloads were emerging that were pushing the boundaries of existing relational database technologies, that were designed primarily for transactional workloads. So-called systems of engagement and systems of analytics we're growing at rates much faster than traditional OLTP workloads. Once again, people ask the question, should I think about running these new workloads on Postgres? Now the answer came from the community response that saw the need to extend the open source platform to handle these emerging workloads. The database market suddenly got really interesting as these new applications emerged. Multiple data sources were combined and analyzed to interpret sentiment from social media and get consumers to buy something before they moved to another website, triangulate data to fight fraud, predict weather patterns, and short drug provenance, and dozens of other use cases. Then when cloud went mainstream, similar questions were asked about Postgres. And once again, the open source community responded to accommodate and extend the platform for the cloud. And now Kubernetes is all the rage. When should I run Postgres and Kubernetes, similar theme right? Open source, community, innovation, lowering license costs, minimizing lock-in, maximizing optionality, avoiding too much database sprawl, confidence to support new workloads. These are the factors that customers tell us they use generally to choose a database, and PostGrest specifically. In reality, it's usually pretty obvious what the right strategic fit is for a platform, but buyers want to make sure they have headroom for innovation. They do want to push the envelope on new data types while at the same time managing their risks. And that's where Postgres and the Postgres community in my view has thrived. It's become the ideal solution for what I call the fat middle of workloads, that are increasingly diverse but require a cost effective and stable approach that can scale. These are some of the themes we heard in the morning keynotes from Suzette Kent, former federal CIO who laid down her knowledge on transformation, leadership, and technology modernization. And then EDB CEO Ed Boyajian gave his annual keynote address and talked about the power of data. Data, as we know is growing at a mind-bending exponential rate. It'll make the 2010s look meager by comparison. My big takeaway from his talk really were around using technology to extract value more quickly. I think this is going to become the new new metric in the industry, which basically is every industry is a data-oriented platform now. Yes, software is eating the world, data is eating software. In other words, the new KPI is how long does it take to go from idea to monetization. That is are going to become critical in my opinion, over this next decade. Ed made what I thought was a critical point, and that is you really can't easily define the future. Industries are transforming right before our eyes. And his premise was that you have to pick a data platform that can evolve in unpredictable times. Now, as I pointed out earlier, the Postgres community has stepped up to changing environments for decades. And that really was a point Boyajian hit on pretty hard. Replatforming is happening and he made a convincing argument that Postgres and EDB will be part of that future, with a significant investment in advancing Postgres with hundreds of engineers on the task. He talked about three growth vectors. First, growth in new workloads. He made the claim that around 50% of new EDB customers are deploying new applications. Second, he talked about legacy migrations as another driver, and third was cloud, both traditional compute in the cloud, but also managed services and DBaaS, database as a service. Of course, he also talked about, and there's been a lot of discussion at Vision 2021 about Kubernetes and developers. Big push there. Let me give you my thoughts on that. First, the Kubernetes community is really focused on security and has made a lot of progress in the past 24 months. I think the second point there is developers, they want simplification, and Kubernetes brings that to a greater degree. And it's maturing with more production-ready capabilities. It just some basic, blocking and tackling, like not releasing with an unstable code, (laughs) but it's still early days and the community has some work to do on things like backwards compatibility, for example. And the release cadence of Kubernetes, it's still pretty frequent, which means you got to update scripts and APIs and the like. Remember, Postgres practitioners, they're used to very high levels of stability. So you got to be a little bit careful there. You got to go experiment because you want to take advantage of containers and benefits within Postgres, but you got to make sure you have the right change management in place and you got the resources to be on top of that. The bottom line is Kubernetes is still a toddler, but it's growing up fast. And I have no doubt it will become a staple of the Postgres stack. I'll end where I started, and that's the market. It's gone from stayed and uninteresting years ago to one that one of the most dynamic sectors of IT infrastructure software. And Ed Boyajian talked about the total available market, the TAM, and the valuations that we're seeing today. The market's enormous. I mean, if you just think about traditional database, it's probably 60 to $70 billion, but when you add in all the data and data clouds and decentralized data architectures and eventually edge computing, the market is potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in value for data platforms. So the last thing I'll say about Vision 21 is there's some great content here that spans both the business discussion and also deep practitioner material. And it's useful, has very useful how to's that both educate and inspire. So sit back and enjoy the show. This is Dave Vellante, and you're watching The Cube's continuous coverage of Postgres Vision 21 brought to you by EDB. Thanks for watching.