>> Narrator: Live, from Denver, Colorado. It's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we are at Commvault GO '19 in Colorado. Stu and I are pleased to welcome a couple of guests joining us this next segment we have Kevin Haro, Infrastructure from Quad, and Matt Tyrer, Senior Manager, Solutions Marketing from Commvault. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Oh, it's great to finally be here! >> Yeah, exciting stuff in the last couple days. So Kevin, let's start with you. Give our audience an understanding of Quad, what kind of business you're in, what services and products you deliver. >> Quad is first and foremost a printer so we do large-scale, long-run printing. We've got locations across the country and Latin America and Europe. So from a data perspective we have our own internal apps and stuff, obviously, but for the most part our large chunks of data come straight from our customers, so. >> Lisa: And what kind of customers are we talking about? >> Customers, magazines, books, anything of that nature. Anybody who needs long-run signs, we do it all, packaging. >> Okay, so talk to us about kind of your role and from a data perspective how it's exploding. (Kevin & Matt laugh) >> It seems to be growing every day, that's true. So the data that comes in from our customers we treat it, we improve it, we add to it and then we have to get it back to them, make sure everything's okay, and then it goes to the printers and then it needs to be saved. So you can imagine that piles up pretty quickly. >> Now is it just that the actual images themselves are getting bigger? Like the content that's coming towards? Or is it also that your customer base is growing and expanding too? So it's the individual customers are getting bigger but also you're getting bigger as well from a Quad perspective. >> Yes, both, all three actually. So you can imagine just the amount of images that go into a catalog and how every single one of those came in. Even though it might be an inch or two big on your page it came in full-res, so it adds up quick. >> All right, Kevin why don't you walk us through what led you down the path to Commvault. If you can give us a little bit of the before, and the process that led to choosing Commvault. >> The initial reason we came into Commvault was actually partially backup related, but we were actually in the middle of a site lifecycle so we were looking to upgrade the hardware at 12 different sites and we wanted to switch the hypervisors at those sites and Commvault provided us the means to do that quickly and easily without us having to rebuild all of those systems. So that was our first introduction to it. That went very well for us. We're doing another round coming up here very soon. And so we've done all that, and now actually we're taking a step back and actually going with a Commvault backup solution itself. >> And what was the hypervisor before and now? >> Those were VMware to HyperView. >> Okay, yeah, Matt, maybe walk us through is that a typical use case that you see out there? Migrations are often one of the most challenging things for infrastructure people. We used to say it was the four-letter word when you're told to migrate something. (Matt laughs) But yeah, take us inside. >> Well I mean, you see, it doesn't have to be just a hypervisor to hypervisor migration. You see it just every day with people shifting workloads into the cloud. And in this case here, it's not a same-for-same movement necessarily. So it could be VMware on one site like what you guys were doing, changing into HyperV. Or it could be simply moving from VMware maybe on-premises to native AMIs in AWS. So you're seeing a lot of people kind of decoupling from that hypervisor layer or at least abstracting it, because it's more about the data itself, and less where the data happens to reside. So I think that's going to continue to be something that we see more and more of, as people continue to move into that multiple cloud environment. Did you guys also move in to the cloud too, as part of this? Or this is just in on-prem? >> Kevin: We have not made a huge on-cloud investment at this point in time. But the story that we've been hearing on the cloud the multicloud and the avoiding the lock-in holds true for us, just at the hypervisor level. We don't want to be kept to decisions that were made five, 10 years ago just because it's hard to get off of a specific hypervisor or piece of software. >> Matt: Yeah. >> So it gives us the flexibility to do what we're looking to do. >> So we talked a little bit about the proliferation of data, both from the actual images and the files getting larger and larger and larger, then growth in the Quad customer base. Talk to us about what you were doing to backup data before because you were using somebody else before you decided to make the move over to Commvault. >> We have been using somebody else. We've actually been using four somebody elses. >> Lisa: Can you tell us who those four somebody elses are? >> Our primary one's were EMC, but aside from that, in smaller offices we had other solutions as well. So we've heard the complexity of Commvault is an issue and we were afraid of it as well but that complexity really doesn't stand up to teaching someone how to restore off of four potentially different systems and four different architectures in general. So getting everything under that one pane of glass is an end goal for sure. >> Was it really the compelling event? or was there maybe an issue like we were hearing on stage this morning with one of the Commvault customers saying "Hey, we had a big failure"? Was there a compelling event or was it, we've got four different solutions in here. We need that single pane of glass 'cause the data has so much value but if we can't see it. >> Kevin: It's really the single pane of glass. I mean, in order to maintain that interconnected web of backups we actually had to home grow our own system just to be able to look up where the backup was to begin with. And while that works, it's effective, it's an extra step that has to be taken in the middle of a recovery process. >> Well, Matt, you started your time at Commvault in the field so bring us a little bit, some of the competitive landscape that you see out there. Consolidating onto a single vendor, obviously, is something we see all the time when there's M&A activity or you've got branch offices and the like. >> Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not uncommon to come across customers in Quad's situation where they've got one product over here one product over there. And I think a lot of it stems from IT was in such a reactive mode for so long that it's almost trying to play catch up. It's like, well we have to address protecting the virtual machines. Okay, we'll draw up a solution in for that. We have to protect the data at the remote site. Well, I can't get my enterprise solution there so I'll drop another band-aid solution in out there. And we're finally getting to that maturity where people are able to go back and re-examine some of those infrastructure decisions made five, 10 years ago and starting to rectify it by being able to bring that data together and consolidate. And so that's kind of what I've always liked about from a Commvault perspective, is that comprehensive coverage Pretty much whatever it is, wherever it is you can get that single pane of glass. And there's a lot of stuff that we can do and data environments are certainly not getting less complex (laughs). >> Well, talk to us about the complexity, Kevin, 'cause at all the shows that we go to complexity is always a topic that we hear for every technology and every customer is looking to reduce complexity, increase agility, all the buzz words right, flexibility, simplicity. You said, very candidly, that when you were looking at the hypervisor switch and when it came time to evaluate the backup solutions, you were concerned about Commvault's complexity. We've heard a lot in the last day and a half about simplicity, reduced complexity. How have you found this implementation in terms of the previous complexity concerns and do you have that single pane of glass that you were looking for? >> Kevin: The complexity, the problem didn't really occur to us. I mean, we were walked through by our vendor very nicely. They got us through, they got us our SOP's built. We've been able to roll it out successfully. We started with some of our hardest sites after that migration product. We started with the ones that were behind double nets and are actually at customer locations behind fire walls we don't own. The ones that have been a problem for us for years to secure those backups and those were where we started and that's where we've actually had some pretty decent success. I mean there is obviously a lot of settings and stuff to be worked through and to have a guide sit there and walk us through and make sure we're getting the backup and the retention that we need. At the end of the day, we've got the backups going and they're working well. >> And that's kind of what we were striving to do when we introduced the Commvault command center was for the customers that don't need to go to that level of detail provide a much more streamlined interface with a lot of the heavy automation elements in it. So customers that don't need those deep controls and customizations can work within that command center. But the ones that do, and actually what's entertaining is a lot of our long-term customers prefer working in that deeper complexity. Because it's like "Oh, I like how I can tune it like this "or I can flip it like that." So it's nice that our customers have the option of working where they feel most comfortable. >> And Matt, I'd love to get your perspective you've been with Commvault for 12 years. >> Matt: Almost, yeah. >> We feel like the last day and a half and we'll say Sanjay really kicked this off yesterday by saying #newCommvault. (Matt laughs) And it does feel like that with the changes to the leadership, the changes to the partner organization and partner programs, the focus on mid market with Metallic, with the Hedvig acquisition. Your perspective on being at Commvault for quite a long time, how do you see the company now? >> It's refreshing when you've been with a company for a long time just to see how we're able to shift how we're talking about ourselves, and it's almost like a brand new level of confidence. You see the smash of color everywhere and just the way that we talk about the solutions, the way we talk about the company as well. It's been a lot of change going on, but it's been exciting to kind of see that next evolution of the company in terms of taking that company to the next step and see what the future holds. So I've been really excited to see all of these changes over the past year and continue to see. (laughs) >> So Kevin you've walked us through from the migration that you did initially to the solutions that you're using today. Where are you looking forward for what you might use with Commvault? And any of the new things that were announced this week catch your eye that you might want to be looking into further when you get back to the office? >> Obviously Kubernetes has been floating around for a while so there's solutions here that we've been looking at, but we really want to get our fundamental backup and retention system to the point where it is no longer consuming whole days of FTEs. So where there's a report that comes out, we can check it, we know that it's good. We don't have to babysit that product, and we can get on to some other larger projects, things of that nature. We can get on to worrying about some of the bigger issues making sure that we're ready for a cyber event, things of that nature. >> All right, you did mention Kubernetes. Where are you as a company with that? Data protection, obviously you need to-- >> Matt: I knew you were going to go there (laughs) >> Worry about, even multicloud. I'll be at KubeCon, maybe see you there. (laughs) >> The first ones have just been rolled out recently they're in, they're up, that's about where that is. >> Matt: Just starting, baby steps. >> Baby steps, yes. But we'd like to do the baby steps correctly so technologies that make sense. >> That's great that you're kind of shifting or it looks like anyway to getting a lot more automated in terms of what you're doing within the Commvault. I met with or I was manning a customer panel yesterday with just a bunch of customers sharing what they were doing from moving towards that self-driving backup or at least backup or managing by exception where the less hands-on you can be, the more time that you've got back into your day to focus on other projects, so yeah. >> Exactly. So yeah, I mean, we're at a point right now where we are obviously switching, so we want to look ahead and make sure that we're set and ready to go for the future. >> So Kevin, last question for you, in the last nine months there's been some pretty big changes at Commvault the new leadership, new focus on routes to market, how do you internalize that, in terms of this direction, this Commvault 2.0, this new Commvault as an existing customer? >> Well, we're a new customer to them so to see the energy that's coming at us is refreshing. To see them placed in the upper quadrants obviously helps sell the product to us for management to back our decisions up, so in general the whole range seems to be getting met and we're not having to say this does everything except X, Y, and Z. >> Excellent, well, Kevin, Matt, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program this afternoon at GO we appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> Lisa: Our pleasure >> Take care >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Commvault GO '19 (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. CUBE's coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, AWS re:inforce 22, security conference. It's AWS' big security conference. Of course, theCUBE's here, all the reinvent, reese, remars, reinforced. We cover 'em all now and the summits. I'm John Furrier, my host Dave Vellante. We have IDC weighing in here with their analysts. We've got some great guests here, Jay Bretzmann research VP at IDC and Philip Bues research manager for Cloud security. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate it. Great to be here. >> Appreciate coming. >> Got a full circle, right? (all laughing) Security's more interesting than storage, isn't it? (all laughing) >> Dave and Jay worked together. This is a great segment. I'm psyched that you guys are here. We had Crawford and Matt Eastwood on at HPE Discover a while back and really the data you guys are getting and the insights are fantastic. So congratulations to IDC. You guys doing great work. We appreciate your time. I want to get your reaction to the event and the keynotes. AWS has got some posture and they're very aggressive on some tones. Some things that we didn't hear. What's your reaction to the keynote? Share your assessment. >> So, you know, I manage two different research services at IDC right now. They are both Cloud security and identity and digital security, right? And what was really interesting is the intersection between the two this morning, because every one of those speakers that came on had something to say about identity or least privileged access, or enable MFA, or make sure that you control who gets access to what and deny explicitly. And it's always been a challenge a little bit in the identity world because a lot of people don't use MFA. And in RSA, that was another big theme at the RSA conference, MFA everywhere. Why don't they use it? Because it introduces friction and all of a sudden people can't get their jobs done. And the whole point of a network is letting people on to get that data they want to get to. So that was kind of interesting, but as we have in the industry, this shared responsibility model for Cloud computing, we've got shared responsibility for between Philip and I. (Philip laughing) I have done in the past more security of the Cloud and Philip is more security in the Cloud. >> So yeah. >> And now with Cloud operation Super Cloud, as we call it, you have on premises, private Cloud coming back, or hasn't really gone anywhere, all that on premises, Cloud operations, public Cloud, and now edge exploding with new requirements. It's really an ops challenge right now. Not so much dev. So the sec and op side is hot right now. >> Yeah, well, we've made this move from monolithic to microservices based applications. And so during the keynote this morning, the announcement around the GuardDuty Malware Protection component, and that being built into the pricing of current GuardDuty, I thought was really key. And there was also a lot of talk about partnering in security certifications, which is also so very important. So we're seeing this move towards filling in that talent gap, which I think we're all aware of in the security industry. >> So Jake, square the circle for me. So Kirk Coofell talked about Amazon AWS identity, where does AWS leave off, and companies like Okta or Ping identity or Cybertruck pickup, how are they working together? Does it just create more confusion and more tools for customers? We know the overused word of seamless. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's never seamless, so how should we think about that? >> So, identity has been around for 35 years or something like that. Started with the mainframes and all that. And if you understand the history of it, you make more sense to the current market. You have to know where people came from and the baggage they're carrying, 'cause they're still carrying a lot of that baggage. Now, when it comes to the Cloud Service providers, they're more an accommodation from the identity standpoint. Let's make it easy inside of AWS to let you single sign on to anything in the Cloud that they have, right? Let's also introduce an additional MFA capability to keep people safer whenever we can and provide people with tools, to get into those applications somewhat easily, while leveraging identities that may live somewhere else. So there's a whole lot of the world that is still active, directory-centric, right? There's another portion of companies that were born in the Cloud that were able to jump on things like Okta and some of the other providers of these universal identities in the Cloud. So, like I said, if you understand where people came from in the beginning, you start to say, "Yeah, this makes sense." >> It's interesting you talk about mainframe. I always think about Rack F, you know. And I say, "Okay, who did what, when, where?" And you hear about a lot of those themes. So what's the best practice for MFA, that's non-SMS-based? Is it you got to wear something around your neck, is it to have sort of a third party authenticator? What are people doing that you guys would recommend? >> Yeah, one quick comment about adoption of MFA. If you ask different suppliers, what percent of your base that does SSO also does MFA, one of the biggest suppliers out there, Microsoft will tell you it's under 25%. That's pretty shocking. All the messaging that's come out about it. So another big player in the market was called Duo, Cisco bought them. >> Yep. >> And because they provide networks, a lot of people buy their MFA. They have probably the most prevalent type of MFA, it's called Push. And Push can be a red X and a green check mark to your phone, it can be a QR code, somewhere, it can be an email push as well. So that is the next easiest thing to adopt after SMS. And as you know, SMS has been denigrated by NIST and others saying, it's susceptible to man and middle attacks. It's built on a telephony protocol called SS7. Predates anything, there's no certification either side. The other real dynamic and identity is the whole adoption of PKI infrastructure. As you know, certificates are used for all kinds of things, network sessions, data encryption, well, identity increasingly. And a lot of the consumers and especially the work from anywhere, people these days have access through smart devices. And what you can do there, is you can have an agent on that smart device, generate your private key and then push out a public key and so the private key never leaves your device. That's one of the most secure ways to- >> So if our SIM card gets hacked, you're not going to be as vulnerable? >> Yeah, well, the SIM card is another challenge associated with the older ways, but yeah. >> So what do you guys think about the open source connection and they mentioned it up top. Don't bolt on security, implying shift left, which is embedding it in like sneak companies, like sneak do that. Very container oriented, a lot of Kubernetes kind of Cloud native services. So I want to get your reaction to that. And then also this reasoning angle they brought up. Kind of a higher level AI reasoning decisions. So open source, and this notion of AI reasoning. or AI reason. >> And you see more open source discussion happening, so you have your building maintaining and vetting of the upstream open source code, which is critical. And so I think AWS talking about that today, they're certainly hitting on a nerve, as you know, open source continues to proliferate. Around the automated reasoning, I think that makes sense. You want to provide guide rails and you want to provide roadmaps and you want to have sort of that guidance as to, okay, what's a correlation analysis of different tools and products? And so I think that's going to go over really well, yeah. >> One of the other key points about open source is, everybody's in a multi-cloud world, right? >> Yeah. >> And so they're worried about vendor lock in. They want an open source code base, so that they don't experience that. >> Yeah, and they can move the code around, and make sure it works well on each system. Dave and I were just talking about some of the dynamics around data control planes. So they mentioned encrypt everything which is great and I message by the way, I love that one. But oh, and he mentioned data at rest. I'm like, "What about data in flight? "Didn't hear that one." So one of the things we're seeing with SuperCloud, and now multi-cloud kind of as destinations of that, is that in digital transformation, customers are leaning into owning their data flows. >> Yeah. >> Independent of say the control plane aspects of what could come in. This is huge implications for security, where sharing data is huge, even Schmidt on stage said, we have billions and billions of things happening that we see things that no one else sees. So that implies, they're sharing- >> Quad trillion. >> Trillion, 15 zeros. (Jay laughs) >> 15 zeros. >> So that implies they're sharing that or using that pushing that into something. So sharing is huge with cyber security. So that implies open data, data flows. How do you guys see this evolving? I know it's kind of emerging, but it's becoming a nuanced point, that's critical to the architecture. >> Well, yeah, I think another way to look at that is the sharing of intelligence and some of the recent directives, from the executive branch, making it easier for private companies to share data and intelligence, which I think strengthens the cyber community overall. >> Depending upon the supplier, it's either an aggregate level of intelligence that has been anonymized or it's specific intelligence for your environment that everybody's got a threat feed, maybe two or three, right? (John laughs) But back to the encryption point, I mean, I was working for an encryption startup for a little while after I left IBM, and the thing is that people are scared of it. They're scared of key management and rotation. And so when you provide- >> Because they might lose the key. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> It's like shooting yourself in the foot, right? So that's when you have things like, KMS services from Amazon and stuff that really help out a lot. And help people understand, okay, I'm not alone in this. >> Yeah, crypto owners- >> They call that hybrid, the hybrid key, they don't know how they call the data, they call it the hybrid. What was that? >> Key management service? >> The hybrid- >> Oh, hybrid HSM, correct? >> Yeah, what is that? What is that? I didn't get that. I didn't understand what he meant by the hybrid post quantum key agreement. >> Hybrid post quantum key exchange. >> AWS never made a product name that didn't have four words in it. (John laughs) >> But he did reference the new NIST algos. And I think I inferred that they were quantum proof or they claim to be, and AWS was testing those. >> Correct, yeah. >> So that was kind of interesting, but I want to come back to identity for a second. So, this idea of bringing traditional IAM and Privileged Access Management together, is that a pipe dream, is that something that is actually going to happen? What's the timeframe, what's your take on that? >> So, there are aspects of privilege in every sort of identity. Back when it was only the back office that used computers for calculations, right? Then you were able to control how many people had access. There were two types of users, admins and users. These days, everybody has some aspect of- >> It's a real spectrum, really. >> Yeah. >> Granular. >> You got the C-suite, the finance people, the DevOps people, even partners and whatever. They all need some sort of privileged access, and the term you hear so much is least-privileged access, right? Shut it down, control it. So, in some of my research, I've been saying that vendors who are in the PAM space, Privilege Access Management space, will probably be growing their suites, playing a bigger role, building out a stack, because they have the expertise and the perspective that says, "We should control this better." How do we do that, right? And we've been seeing that recently. >> Is that a combination of old kind of antiquated systems meets for proprietary hyper scale, or kind of like build your own? 'Cause I mean, Amazon, these guys, Facebook, they all build their own stuff. >> Yes, they do. >> Then enterprises buy services from general purpose identity management systems. >> So as we were talking about knowing the past and whatever, Privileged Access Management used to be about compliance reporting. Just making sure that I knew who accessed what? And could prove it, so I didn't fail at all. >> It wasn't a critical infrastructure item. >> No, and now these days, what it's transitioning into, is much more risk management, okay. I know what our risk is, I'm ahead of it. And the other thing in the PAM space, was really session monitor. Everybody wanted to watch every keystroke, every screen's scrape, all that kind of stuff. A lot of the new Privileged Access Management, doesn't really require that. It's a nice to have feature. You kind of need it on the list, but is anybody really going to implement it? That's the question, right. And then if you do all that session monitoring, does anybody ever go back and look at it? There's only so many hours in the day. >> How about passwordless access? (Jay laughs) I've heard people talk about that. I mean, that's as a user, I can't wait but- >> Well, it's somewhere we want to all go. We all want identity security to just disappear and be recognized when we log in. So the thing with passwordless is, there's always a password somewhere. And it's usually part of a registration action. I'm going to register my device with a username password, and then beyond that I can use my biometrics, right? I want to register my device and get a private key, that I can put in my enclave, and I'll use that in the future. Maybe it's got to touch ID, maybe it doesn't, right? So even though there's been a lot of progress made, it's not quote, unquote, truly passwordless. There's a group, industry standards group called Fido. Which is Fast Identity Online. And what they realized was, these whole registration passwords, that's really a single point of failure. 'Cause if I can't recover my device, I'm in trouble. So they just did new extension to sort of what they were doing, which provides you with much more of like an iCloud vault that you can register that device in and other devices associated with that same identity. >> Get you to it if you have to. >> Exactly. >> I'm all over the place here, but I want to ask about ransomware. It may not be your wheelhouse. But back in the day, Jay, remember you used to cover tape. All the backup guys now are talking about ransomware. AWS mentioned it today and they showed a bunch of best practices and things you can do. Air gaps wasn't one of them. I was really surprised 'cause that's all every anybody ever talks about is air gaps and a lot of times that air gap could be a guess to the Cloud, I guess, I'm not sure. What are you guys seeing on ransomware apps? >> We've done a lot of great research around ransomware as a service and ransomware, and we just had some data come out recently, that I think in terms of spending and spend, and as a result of the Ukraine-Russia war, that ransomware assessments rate number one. And so it's something that we encourage, when we talk to vendors and in our services, in our publications that we write about taking advantage of those free strategic ransomware assessments, vulnerability assessments, as well and then security and training ranked very highly as well. So, we want to make sure that all of these areas are being funded well to try and stay ahead of the curve. >> Yeah, I was surprised to not see air gaps on the list, that's all everybody talks about. >> Well, the old model for air gaping in the land days, the novel days, you took your tapes home and put them in the sock drawer. (all laughing) >> Well, it's a form of air gap. (all laughing) >> Security and no one's going to go there and clean out. >> And then the internet came around and ruined it. >> Guys, final question we want to ask you, guys, we kind of zoom out, great commentary by the way. Appreciate it. We've seen this in many markets, a collection of tools emerge and then there's its tool sprawl. So cyber we're seeing the trend now where mon goes up on stage of all the ecosystems, probably other vendors doing the same thing where they're organizing a platform on top of AWS to be this super platform, for super Cloud capability by building a more platform thing. So we're saying there's a platform war going on, 'cause customers don't want the complexity. I got a tool but it's actually making it more complex if I buy the other tool. So the tool sprawl becomes a problem. How do you guys see this? Do you guys see this platform emerging? I mean tools won't go away, but they have to be easier. >> Yeah, we do see a consolidation of functionality and services. And we've been seeing that, I think through a 2020 Cloud security survey that we released that was definitely a trend. And that certainly happened for many companies over the last six to 24 months, I would say. And then platformization absolutely is something we talk and write about all the time so... >> Couple of years ago, I called the Amazon tool set an erector set because it really required assembly. And you see the emphasis on training here too, right? You definitely need to go to AWS University to be competent. >> It wasn't Lego blocks yet. >> No. >> It was erector set. >> Yeah. >> Very good distinction. >> Loose. >> And you lose a few. (chuckles) >> But still too many tools, right? You see, we need more consolidation. It's getting interesting because a lot of these companies have runway and you look at sale point at stock prices held up 'cause of the Thoma Bravo acquisition, but all the rest of the cyber stocks have been crushed especially the high flyers, like a Sentinel-1 one or a CrowdStrike, but just still M and A opportunity. >> So platform wars. Okay, final thoughts. What do you, think is happening next? What's your outlook for the next year or so? >> So, in the identity space, I'll talk about, Philip can cover Cloud for us. It really is more consolidation and more adoption of things that are beyond simple SSO. It was, just getting on the systems and now we really need to control what you're able to get to and who you are. And do it as transparently as we possibly can, because otherwise, people are going to lose productivity. They're not going to be able to get to what they want. And that's what causes the C-suite to say, "Wait a minute," DevOps, they want to update the product every day. Make it better. Can they do that or did security get in the way? People, every once in a while call security, the Department of No, right? >> They ditch it on stage. They want to be the Department of Yes. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> And the department that creates additional value. If you look at what's going on with B2C or CIAM, consumer oriented identity, that is all about opening up new direct channels and treating people like their old friends, not like you don't know them, you have to challenge them. >> We always say, you want to be in the boat together, it sinks or not. >> Yeah. Exactly. >> Philip I'm glad- >> Okay, what's your take? What's your outlook for the year? >> Yeah, I think, something that we've been seeing as consolidation and integration, and so companies looking at from built time to run time, investing in shift left infrastructure is code. And then also in the runtime detection, makes perfect sense to have both the agent and agent lists so that you're covering any of the gaps that might exist. >> Awesome, Jay Phillip, thanks for coming on "theCUBE" with IDC and sharing your- >> Oh, our pleasure- >> Perspective, commentary and insights and outlook. Appreciate it. >> You bet. >> Thank you. >> Okay, we've got the great direction here from IDC analyst here on the queue. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Be back more after this short break. (bright upbeat music)

>>what? Hello, I'm john free with the cube. I want to welcome Conrad Feldman, the founder and Ceo of Kwan cast here to kick off the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The events called the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. The changing advertising landscape, super relevant conversation just now. More than ever. Conrad welcome to your own program kicking this off. Thanks for holding this event. It's a pleasure. Great to chat with you today. So a big fan been following your company since the founding of it. Been analytics is always the prize of any data driven company. Media. Anything's all data driven now. Um, talk about the open internet because now more than ever it's under siege. As I, as I mentioned in my open, um, we've been seeing the democratization, a new trend of decentralization. We're starting to see um, you know, everyone's present online now, Clay Shirky wrote a book called, here comes everyone in 2005. Well everyone's here. Right? So you know, we're here, it's gonna be more open. But yet people are looking at as close right now. You're seeing the big players, um, or in the data. What's your vision of this open internet? >>Well, an open internet exists for everyone. And if you think about the evolution of the internet, when the internet was created for the first time really in history, anyone that had access to the internet could publish the content, whatever they were interested in and could find an audience. And of course that's grown to where we are today, where five billion people around the world are able to engage in all sorts of content, whether that's entertainment or education, news, movies. What's perhaps not so widely understood is that most of that content is paid for by advertising and there's a lot of systems that support advertising on the open Internet and some of those are under siege today certainly. >>And what's the big pressure point? Is it just more control the data? Is it just that these walled gardens are wanting to, you know, suck the audience in there? Is that monetization driving it? What's where's the friction? >>Well, the challenges is sort of the accumulation of power into a really small number of now giant corporations who have actually reduced a lot of the friction that marketers have in spending their money effectively. And it means that those companies are capturing a disproportionate spend of the ad budgets that fund digital content. So the problem is if more of the money goes to them, less of its going to independent content creators. It's actually getting harder for independent voices to emerge and be heard. And so that's the real challenges. That has more power consolidates into just a limited number of tech giants. The funding path for the open Internet becomes constrained and there'll be less choice for consumers without having to pay for subscriptions. >>Everyone knows the more data you have the better and certainly, but the centralized power when the trend is going the other way, the consensus is everyone wants to be decentralized more truth, more trust all this is being talked about on the heels of the google's news around, you know, getting rid of third party cookies and others have followed suit. Um, what does this mean? I mean, this cookies have been the major vehicle for tracking and getting that kind of data. What is gonna be replaced with what is this all about? And can you share with us what the future will look like? >>Sure, Well, just as advertising funds the open Internet is advertising technology that supports that advertising spend. It supports sort of the business of advertising that funds the open Internet. And within all of that technology is the need for different systems to be able to align around um the identification of for example, a consumer, Have they been to this site before? Have they seen an ad before? So there's all of these different systems that might be used for advertising for measurement, for attribution, for creating personalization. And historically they've relied upon the third party cookie as the mechanism for synchronization. Well, the third party cookie has been in decline for some time. It's already mostly gone from actually apple safari browser, but google's chrome has so much control over how people access the internet. And so it was when Google announced that chrome was going to deprecate the third party cookie, that it really sort of focus the minds of the industry in terms of finding alternative ways to tailor content and ultimately to just simply measure the effectiveness of advertising. And so there's an enormous amount of um innovation taking place right now to find alternative solutions. >>You know, some are saying that the free open internet was pretty much killed when, you know, the big comes like facebook and google started bringing all this data and kind of pulls all sucks all the auction in the room, so to speak. What's this mean with cookies now getting, getting rid of um, by google has an impact publishers because is it helpful? I mean hurtful. I mean, where's the where is that, what the publisher impact? >>Well, I don't think anyone really knows right now. So first of all, cookies weren't necessarily a very good solution to the sort of the challenge of maintaining state and understanding those sorts of the delivery of advertising and so on. It's just the one that's commonly used, I think for different publishers it may mean different things. But many publishers need to be able to demonstrate the value and the effectiveness of the advertising solutions that they deliver. So they'll be innovating in terms of how they use their first party data. They'll be continuing to use contextual solutions that have long been used to create advertising relevant, relevant. I think the big question of course is how we're going to measure it that any of this is effective at all because everyone relies upon measuring advertising effectiveness to justify capturing those budgets in the first place. >>You know, you mentioned contextual come up a lot also in the other interviews we've done with the folks in the around the internet around this topic of machine learning is a big 12 What is the impact of this with the modernization of the solution? You mentioned cookies? Okay cookies, old technology. But the mechanisms in this ecosystem around it or not, it funds the open internet. What is that modern solution that goes that next level? Is it contextual metadata? Is that shared systems? What's the it's the modernization of that. >>It's all of those and and more. There's no there's no single solution to replace the third party cookie. There'll be a combination of solutions. Part of that will be alternative identity mechanisms. So you know, you will start to see more registration wars to access content so that you have what's called a deterministic identify there will be statistical models so called probabilistic models, contextual has always been important. It will become more important and it will be combined with we use contextual combining natural language processing with machine learning models to really understand the detailed context of different pages across the internet. You'll also see the use of first party data and there are discussions about shared data services as well. I think there's gonna be a whole set of different innovations that will need to inter operate and it's going to be an evolutionary process as people get used to using these different systems to satisfy the different stages of the media fulfillment cycle from research and planning to activation to measurement. >>You know, you put up walled gardens. I want to just touch on the on on this kind of concept of walled gardens and and and and compare and contrast that with the demand for community, open internet has always fostered a community vibe. You see network effects mostly in distinct user communities or subnets of sub networks. If you will kind of walled gardens became that kind of group get together but then became more of a media solution to make the user is the product, as they say, facebook's a great example, right? People talk about facebook and from that misinformation abuse walled garden is not the best thing happening right now in the world, but yet is there any other other choice? That's how they're going to make money? But yet everyone wants trust, truth community. Are they usually exclusive? How do you see this evolving, what's your take? >>Well, I think the open internet is a, is a forum where anyone can have their voice, uh, put their voice out there and have it discovered and it's in that regard, it's a it's a force for good look. I think there are there are challenges, obviously in terms of some of the some of the optimization that takes place with inside the walled gardens, which is, is sort of optimized to drive engagement can have some unintended consequences. Um obviously that's something that's, that's broadly being discussed today and the impact on society, but sort of more at a more pointed level, it's just the absorption of advertising dollars. There's a finite amount of money from advertisers. It's estimated to be $400 billion this year in digital advertising. So it's a huge amount of money in terms of funding the open Internet, which sounds great except for its increasingly concentrated in a tiny number of companies. And so, you know, our job at Quan cast as champions of the free and open Internet is to help direct money effectively to publishers across the open internet and give advertisers a reliable, repeatable way of accessing the audiences that they care about in the environment they care about and delivering advertising results. >>It's a publisher, we care a lot about what our audience wants and try to serve them and listen to them. If we could get the data, we want that data and then also broker in the monetization with advertisers, who might want to reach that audience in whatever way. So this brings up the question of, you know, automation and role of data. You know, this is a huge thing to having that data closed loop, if you will for for publishers. But yet most publishers are small, some niche. And even as they can become super large, they don't have all the data and more, the more data, the better the machine learning. So what's the answer to this as it goes forward? How do we get there? What's the dots that that we need to connect to get that future state? >>So I think it takes it takes companies working together effectively. I think a really important part of it is, is a more direct conversation with consumers. We've seen that change beginning to happen over the past few years with the introduction of regulations that require clear communication to consumers about the data that's captured. And y and I think that creates an opportunity to explain to your audience is the way in which content is funded. So I think that consumer that consumer conversation will be part of the collective solution. >>You know, I want to as we wind down this kickoff segment, get your thoughts and vision around um, the evolution of the internet and you guys have done some great work at quan Cast is well documented, but everyone used to talk about traffic by traffic, then it became cost of acquisitions. PPC search. This is either mechanisms that people have been using for a long, long time, then you know, your connections but audience is about traffic, audience traffic. If this if my family is online, doesn't it become about networks and the people. So I want to get your thoughts and your vision because if community is going to be more important than people agree that it is and things are gonna be decentralized, more openness, more voices to be heard. You need to dress ability. The formation of networks and groups become super important. What's your vision on that? >>So my vision is to create relevance and utility for consumers. I think that's one of the things that's often forgotten is that when we make advertising more relevant and useful for consumers, it automatically fulfils the objectives that publishers and marketers have, everyone wins when advertising is more relevant. And our vision is to make advertising relevant across the entire open internet so that that ad supported model can continue to flourish and that five billion and hopefully many more billions in the future, people around the world have access to high quality, diverse content. >>If someone asked you Conrad, what is quant cast doing to make the open internet viable now that cookies are going away? What's the answer? >>So well, the cookie pieces is a central piece of it in terms of finding solutions that will enable sort of planning activation and measurement post cookies and we have a lot of innovation going on. There were also working with a range of industry bodies and our and our partners to build solutions for this. What we're really trying to do is to make buying the open internet as straightforward for marketers as it is today and buying the walled gardens. The reason the walled gardens capture so much money is they made it really easy for marketers to get results, marketers would like to be able to spend their money across all of the diverse publishes the open internet. You know, our job at Comcast is to make it just as easy to effectively spend money in funding the content that they really care about in reaching the audiences that they want. >>Great stuff. Great Mission. Conrad, thanks for coming on. Conrad Feldmann founder and Ceo here at the cookie conundrum recipe for success event, Quant Cast Industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. Thank you. Conrad appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, I'm john ferrier, stay with us for more on the industry event around the middle cookies. Mhm Yeah, yeah, thank you. Mhm. Welcome back to the Qantas industry summit on the demise of third party cookies, the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. I'm john furrier host of the cube, the changing landscape of advertising is here and shit Gupta, founder of you of digital is joining us chief. Thanks for coming on this segment. Really appreciate, I know you're busy, you've got two young kids as well as providing education to the digital industry, you got some kids to take care of and train them to. So welcome to the cube conversation here as part of the program. >>Yeah, thanks for having me excited to be here. >>So the office of the changing landscape of advertising really centers around the open to walled garden mindset of the web and the big power players. We know the big 34 tech players dominate the marketplace so clearly in a major inflection point and we've seen this movie before Web mobile revolution which was basically a reply platform NG of capabilities. But now we're in an error of re factoring the industry, not re platt forming a complete changing over of the value proposition. So a lot at stake here as this open web, open internet, global internet evolves. What are your, what's your take on this, this industry proposals out there that are talking to this specific cookie issue? What does it mean? And what proposals are out there? >>Yeah, so, you know, I I really view the identity proposals and kind of to to kind of groups, two separate groups. So on one side you have what the walled gardens are doing and really that's being led by google. Right, so google um you know, introduce something called the privacy sandbox when they announced that they would be deprecating third party cookies uh as part of the privacy sandbox, they've had a number of proposals unfortunately, or you know, however you want to say they're all bird themed for some reason, I don't know why. Um but the one, the bird theme proposal that they've chosen to move forward with is called flock, which stands for Federated learning of cohorts. And essentially what it all boils down to is google is moving forward with cohort level learning and understanding of users in the future after third party cookies, unlike what we've been accustomed to in this space, which is a user level understanding of people and what they're doing online for targeting tracking purposes. And so that's on one side of the equation, it's what google is doing with flock and privacy sandbox now on the other side is, you know, things like unified I. D. Two point or the work that I. D five is doing around building new identity frameworks for the entire space that actually can still get down to the user level. Right? And so again, unified I. D. Two point oh comes to mind because it's the one that's probably got the most adoption in the space. It's an open source framework. So the idea is that it's free and pretty much publicly available to anybody that wants to use it and unified, I need to point out again is user level. So it's it's basically taking data that's authenticated data from users across various websites you know that are logging in and taking those authenticated users to create some kind of identity map. And so if you think about those two work streams right, you've got the walled gardens and or you know, google with flock on one side and then you've got unified I. D. Two point oh and other I. D. Frameworks for the open internet. On the other side, you've got these two very differing type of approaches to identity in the future. Again on the google side it's cohort level, it's going to be built into chrome. Um The idea is that you can pretty much do a lot of the things that we do with advertising today, but now you're just doing it at a group level so that you're protecting privacy, whereas on the other side of the open internet you're still getting down to the user level. Um And that's pretty powerful. But the the issue there is scale, right? We know that a lot of people are not logged in on lots of websites. I think the stat that I saw is under five of all website traffic is authenticated. So really if you if you simplify things you boil it all down, you have kind of these two very differing approaches. >>I guess the question it really comes down to what alternatives are out there for cookies and which ones do you think will be more successful? Because I think, you know, the consensus is at least from my reporting, in my view, is that the world agrees. Let's make it open, Which one is going to be better. >>Yeah, that's a great question, john So as I mentioned, right, we have we have to kind of work streams here, we've got the walled garden work streams, work stream being led by google and their work around flock, and then we've got the open internet, right? Let's say unified I. D to kind of represents that. I personally don't believe that there is a right answer or an endgame here. I don't think that one of them wins over the other, frankly, I think that, you know, first of all, you have those two frameworks, neither of them are perfect, they're both flawed in their own ways. There are pros and cons to both of them. And so what we're starting to see now is you have other companies kind of coming in and building on top of both of them as kind of a hybrid solution. Right? So they're saying, hey, we use, you know, an open I. D. Framework in this way to get down to the user level and use that authenticated data and that's important. But we don't have all the scale. So now we go to google and we go to flock to kind of fill the scale. Oh and hey, by the way, we have some of our own special sauce, right? We have some of our own data, we have some of our own partnerships, we're gonna bring that in and layer it on top. Right? And so really where I think things are headed is the right answer, frankly, is not one or the other. It's a little mishmash of both. With a little extra something on top. I think that's that's what we're starting to see out of a lot of companies in the space. And I think that's frankly where we're headed. >>What do you think the industry will evolve to, in your opinion? Because I think this is gonna, you can't ignore the big guys on this because these programmatic you mentioned also the data is there. But what do you think the market will evolve to with this, with this conundrum? >>So, so I think john where we're headed? You know, I think we're right now we're having this existential existential crisis, right? About identity in this industry, because our world is being turned upside down, all the mechanisms that we've used for years and years are being thrown out the window and we're being told they were gonna have new mechanisms, Right? So cookies are going away device ids are going away and now we got to come up with new things and so the world is being turned upside down and everything that you read about in the trades and you know, we're here talking about it, right? Like everyone's always talking about identity right now, where do I think this is going if I was to look into my crystal ball, you know, this is how I would kind of play this out. If you think about identity today. Right? Forget about all the changes. Just think about it now and maybe a few years before today, Identity for marketers in my opinion has been a little bit of a checkbox activity. Right? It's been hey, um, okay, uh, you know ad tech company or a media company, do you have an identity solution? Okay. Tell me a little bit more about it. Okay, Sounds good. That sounds good. Now can we move on and talk about my business and how are you going to drive meaningful outcomes or whatever for my business? And I believe the reason that is, is because identity is a little abstract, right? It's not something that you can actually get meaningful validation against. It's just something that, you know. Yes, You have it. Okay, great. Let's move on, type of thing. Right. And so that, that's, that's kind of where we've been now, all of a sudden The cookies are going away, the device ids are going away. And so the world is turning upside down in this crisis of how are we going to keep doing what we were doing for the last 10 years in the future. So everyone's talking about it and we're trying to re engineer right? The mechanisms now if I was to look into the crystal ball right 2 3 years from now where I think we're headed is not much is going to change. And what I mean by that john is um uh I think that marketers will still go to companies and say do you have an ID solution? Okay tell me more about it. Okay uh Let me understand a little bit better. Okay you do it this way. Sounds good. Now the ways in which companies are going to do it will be different right now. It's flock and unified I. D. And this and that right. The ways the mechanisms will be a little bit different but the end state right? Like the actual way in which we operate as an industry and kind of like the view of the landscape in my opinion will be very simple or very similar, right? Because marketers will still view it as a tell me you have an ID solution. Make me feel good about it. Help me check the box and let's move on and talk about my business and how you're going to solve for my needs. So I think that's where we're going. That is not by any means to discount this existential moment that we're in. This is a really important moment where we do have to talk about and figure out what we're going to do in the future. My just my viewpoint is that the future will actually not look all that different than the present. >>And I'll say the user base is the audience. Their their data behind it helps create new experiences, machine learning and Ai are going to create those and we have the data you have the sharing it or using it as we're finding shit Gupta great insight dropping some nice gems here. Founder of you of Digital and also the Adjunct professor of Programmatic advertising at Levi School of Business and santa Clara University professor. Thank you for coming dropping the gems here and insight. Thank you. >>Thanks a lot for having me john really appreciate >>it. Thanks for watching. The cooking 100 is the cube host Jon ferrier me. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Hello welcome back to the cookie conundrum recipe for success and industry conference and summit from Guanacaste on the demise of third party cookies. Got a great industry panel here to break it down chris Gunther Senior Vice president Global Head of programmatic at news corp chris thanks for coming on Zal in Managing Director Solutions at Z axis and Summer Simpson. Vice president Product at quan cast stellar panel. Looking forward to this conversation. Uh thanks for coming on and chatting about the cookie conundrum. Thank you for having us. So chris we'll start with you at news corp obviously a major publisher deprecation of third party cookies affects everyone. You guys have a ton of traffic, ton of audience across multiple formats. Um, tell us about the impact to you guys and the reliance he has had on them. And what are you gonna do to prepare for this next level change? >>Sure. I mean, I think like everyone in this industry there's uh a significant reliance and I think it's something that a lot of talk about audience targeting but obviously that reliance on third party cookies pervasive across the whole at tech ecosystem Martek stack. And so you know, we have to think about how that impact vendor vendors, we work with what it means in terms of use cases across marketing, across advertising, across site experience. So, you know, without a doubt, it it's it's significant, but you know, we look at it as listen, it's disruptive, uh, disruption and change is always a little scary. Um, but overall it's a, it's a long overdue reset. I mean, I think that, you know, our perspective is that the cookies, as we all know was it was a crutch, right sort of a technology being used in way it shouldn't. Um, and so as we look at what's going to happen presumably after Jan 2022 then it's, it's a good way to kind of fix on some bad practices practices that lead to data leakage, um, practice or devalue for our perspective, some of the, you know, we offered as as publishers and I think that this is a key thing is that we're not just looking to as we look at the post gender world, not just kind of recreating the prior world because the prior world was flawed or I guess you could say the current world since it hasn't changed yet. But the current world is flawed. Let's not just not, you know, let's not just replicate that. Let's make sure that, you know, third party cookie goes away. Other work around like fingerprinting and things like that. You know, also go away so philosophically, that's where our heads at. And so as we look at how we are preparing, you know, you look at what are the core building blocks of preparing for this world. Obviously one of the key ones is privacy compliance. Like how do we treat our users with consent? Yeah, obviously. Are we um aligned with the regulatory environments? Yeah. In some ways we're not looking just a Jan 2022, but Jan 23 where there's gonna be the majority of our audiences we covered by regulation. And so I think from regulation up to data gathering to data activation, all built around an internal identifier that we've developed that allows us to have a consistent look at our users whether they're logged in or obviously anonymous. So it's really looking across all those components across all our sites and in all in a privacy compliant way. So a lot of work to be done, a lot of work in progress. But we're >>excited about what's going on. I like how you framed at Old world or next gen kind of the current situation kind of flawed. And as you think about programmatic, the concept is mind blowing and what needs to be done. So we'll come back to that because I think that original content view is certainly relevant, a huge investment and you've got great content and audience consuming it from a major media standpoint. Get your perspective on the impact because you've got clients who want to get their their message out in front of the audience at the right time, at the right place and the right context. Right, So your privacy, you got consent, all these things kind of boiling up. How do you help clients prepare? Because now they can go direct to the consumer. Everyone, everyone has a megaphone, now, everyone's, everyone's here, everyone's connected. So how are you impacted by this new notion? >>You know, if if the cookie list future was a tic tac, dance will be dancing right now, and at least into the next year, um this has been top of mind for us and our clients for quite some time, but I think as each day passes, the picture becomes clearer and more in focus. Uh the end of the third party cookie does not mean the end of programmatic. Um so clients work with us in transforming their investments into real business outcomes based on our expertise and based on our tech. So we continue to be in a great position to lead to educate, to partner and to grow with them. Um, along this uh cookie list future, the impact will be all encompassing in changing the ways we do things now and also accelerating the things that we've already been building on. So we take it from the top planning will have a huge impact because it's gonna start becoming more strategic around real business outcomes. Uh where Omni channel, So clients want to drive outcomes, drew multiple touch points of a consumer's journey, whether it has programmatic, whether it has uh cookie free environment, like connected tv, digital home audio, gaming and so forth. So we're going to see more of these strategic holistic plans. Creative will have a lot of impact. It will start becoming more important with creative testing. Creative insights. You know, creative in itself is cookie list. So there will be more focused on how to drive uh brand dialogue to connect to consumers with less targeting. With less cookies, with the cohesiveness of holistic planning. Creative can align through multiple channels and lastly, the role of a. I will become increasingly important. You know, we've always looked to build our tech our products to complement new and existing technology as well as the client's own data and text back to deliver these outcomes for them. And ai in its core it's just taking input data uh and having an output of your desired outcome. So input data could be dSP data beyond cookies such as browser such as location, such as contextual or publisher taking clients first party data, first party crm data like store visitation, sales, site activity. Um and using that to optimize in real time regardless of what vendor or what channel we're on. Um So as we're learning more about this cookie list dance, we're helping our clients on the steps of it and also introducing our own moves. >>That's awesome. Data is going to be a key value proposition, connecting in with content real time. Great stuff. Somewhere with your background in journalism and you're the tech VP of product at quan cast. You have the keys to the kingdom over there. It's interesting Journalism is about truth and good content original content. But now you have a data challenge problem opportunity on both sides, brands and publishers coming together. It's a data problem in a way it's a it's a tech stack, not so much just getting the right as to show up at the right place the right time. It's really bigger than that now. What's your take on this? >>Um you know, >>so first >>I think that consumers already sort of like except that there is a reasonable value exchange for their data in order to access free content. Right? And that's that's a critical piece for us to all kind of like understand over the past. Hi guys, probably two years since even even before the G. D. P. R. We've been doing a ton of discovery with customers, both publishers and marketers. Um and so you know, we've kind of known this, this cookie going away thing has been coming. Um And you know, Google's announcement just kind of confirmed it and it's been, it's been really, really interesting since Google's announcement, how the conversations have changed with with our customers and other folks that we talked to. And I've almost gone from being like a product manager to a therapist because there's such an emotional response. Um you know, from the marketing perspective, there's real fear there. There's like, oh my God, how you know, it's not just about, you know, delivering ads, it's about how do I control frequency? How do I, how do I measure, you know, success? Because the technology has has grown so much over the years to really give marketers the ability to deliver personalized advertising, good content, right. The consumers um and be able to monitor it and control it so that it's not too too intrusive on the publisher perspective side, we see slightly different response. It's more of a yes, right. You know, we're taking back control and we're going to stop the data leakage, we're going to get the value back for our inventory. Um and that both things are a good thing, but if it's, if it's not managed, it's going to be like ships passing in the night, right? In terms of um of, you know, they're there, them coming together, right, and that's the critical pieces that they have to come together. They have to get closer, you got to cut out a lot of that loom escape in the middle so that they can talk to each other and understand what's the value exchange happening between marketers and publishers and how do we do that without cookies? >>It's a fascinating, I love love your insight there. I think it's so relevant and it's got broader implications because, you know, if you look at how data's impact, some of these big structural changes and re factoring of industries, look at cyber security, you know, no one wants to share their data, but now if they share they get more insight, more machine learning, benefit more ai benefit. So now we have the sharing notion, but that goes against counter the big guys that want to wall garden, they want to hoard all the data and and control that to provide their own personalization. So you have this confluence of, hey, I want to hoard the data and then now I want to share the data. So so christmas summer you're in the, in the wheelhouse, you got original content and there's other providers out there. So is there the sharing model coming with privacy and these kinds of services? Is the open, come back again? How do you guys see this uh confluence of open versus walled gardens, because you need the data to make machine learning good. >>So I'll start uh start off, I mean, listen, I think you have to give credit to the walled gardens have created, I think as we look as publishers, what are we offering to our clients, what are we offering to the buy side? We need to be compelling. We shouldn't just be uh yeah, actually as journalists, I think that there is a case of the importance of funding journalism. Um but ultimately we need to make sure we're meeting the KPI is and the business needs of the buy side. And I think around that it is the sort of three core pillars that its ease of access, its scope of of activation and targeting and finally measurable results. So as I think is us as an individual publishers, so we have, we have multiple publications. So we do have scale. But then in partnership with other publishers perhaps to organizations like pre bid, you know, I think we can, you know, we're trying to address that and I think we can offer something that's compelling um, and transparent in terms of what these results are. But obviously, you know, I want to make sure it's clear transparent terms of results, but obviously where there's privacy in terms of the data and I think the form, you know, I think we've all heard a lot like data clean rooms, a lot of them out there flogging those wears. I think there's something valuable but you know, I think it's the right who is sort of the right partner or partners um and ultimately who allows us to get as close as possible to the buy side. And so that we can share that data for targeting, share it for perhaps for measurement, but obviously all in a privacy compliant >>way summer, what's your take on this? Because you talk about the future of the open internet democratization, the network effect that we're seeing in Vire al Itty and across multiple on the on the channels. Is that pointed out what's happening? That's the distribution now. So um that's almost an open garden model. So it's like um yeah, >>yeah, it's it's um you know, back in the day, you know, um knight ridder who was who was the first group that I that I worked for, um you know, each of those individual properties, um we're not hugely valuable on their own from a digital perspective, but together as a unit, they became valuable, right, and got scale for advertisers. Now we're in a place where, you know, I kind of think that each of those big networks are going to have to come together and work together to compare in size to the, to the world gardens. Um, and yeah, this is something that we've talked about before and an open garden. Um, I think that's the, that's the definitely the right route to take. And I and I agree with chris it's, it's about publishers getting as close to the market. Is it possible working with the tech companies that enable them to do that and doing so in a very privacy centric >>way. So how do we bring the brands and agencies together to get ready for third party cookies? Because there is a therapist moment here of it's gonna be okay. The parachute will open. The future is not gonna be as as grim. Um, it's a real opportunity. But if managed properly, what's your take on this is just more first party data strategy and what's your assessment of this? >>So we collaborated right now with ball grants on how did this still very complex cookie list future. Um, you know what's going to happen in the future? 2, 6 steps that we can take right now and market should take. Um, The first step is to gather intel on what's working on your current campaign, analyzing the data sets across cookie free environment. So you can translate those tactics eventually when the cookies do go away. So we have to look at things like temperature or time analysis. We could look at log level data. We could look at site analytics data. We can look at brand measurement tools and how creative really impacts the campaign success. The second thing we can look at is geo targeting strategies. The geo target strategy has been uh underrated because the granularity and geo data could go down all the way to the local level, even beyond zip code. So for example the census black data and this is especially important for CPG brands. So we're working closely with the client teams to understand not only the online data but the offline data and how we can utilize that in the future. Uh We want to optimize investments around uh markets that are working so strong markets and then test and underperforming markets. The third thing we can look at is contextual. So contextual by itself is cookie free. Uh We could build on small scale usage to test and learn various keywords and content categories based sets. Working closely with partners to find ways to leverage their data to mimic audiences that you are trying to target right now with cookies. Um the 4th 1 is publisher data or publisher targeting. So working with your publishers that you have strong relationships with who can curate similar audiences using their own first party data and conducting RFs to understand the scale and reach against your audience and their future role maps. So work with your top publishers based on historical data to try to recreate your best strategies. The 15 and I think this is very important is first party data, you know, that's going to matter more than ever. In the calculus future brands will need to think about how to access and developed the first party data starting with the consumers seeing a value in exchange for the information. It's a gold mine and understanding of consumer, their intent, the journey um and you need a really great data science team to extract insights out of that data, which will be crucial. So partner with strategic onboarding vendors and vet their ability to accept first party data into a cleaner environment for targeting for modeling for insight. And lastly, the six thing that we can do is begin to inform prospect prospecting by dedicating test budget to start gaining learnings about cookie list 11 place that we can start and it is under invested right now is Safari and Firefox. They have been calculus for quite some time so you can start here and begin testing here. Uh work with your data scientist team to understand the right mix is to to target and start exploring other channels outside of um just programmatic cookies like CTV digital, out of home radio gaming and so forth. So those are the six steps that we're taking right now with our clients to uh prepare and plan for the cookie list future. >>So chris let's go back to you. What's the solution here? Is there one, is there multiple solutions? What's the future look like for a cookie was future? >>Uh I think the one certain answers, they're definitely not just one solution. Um as we all know right now there there seems to be endless solutions, a lot of ideas out there, proposals with the W three C uh work happening within other industry bodies uh you know private companies solutions being offered and you know, it's a little bit of it's enough to make everyone's head spin and to try to track it to understand and understand the impact. And as a publisher were obviously a lot of people are knocking on our door. Uh they're saying, hey our solution is one that is going to bring in lots of money, you know, the all the buy side is going to use it. This is the one like I ma call to spend um, and so expect here and so far is that none of these solutions are I think everyone is still testing and learning no one on the buy side from our, from our knowledge is really committed to one or a few. It's all about a testing stage. I think that, you know, putting aside all that noise, I think what matters the most to us as publisher is actually something summer mentioned before. It's about control. You know, if we're going to work with a again, outside of our sort of, you know, internal identifier work that we're doing is we're going to work with an outside party or outside approach doesn't give us control as a publisher to ensure that it is, we control the data from our users. There isn't that data leakage, it's probably compliant. What information gets shared out there. What is it, what's released within within the bid stream? Uh If it is something that's attached to a somewhat declared user registered user that if that then is not somehow amplified or leverage off on another site in a way that is leveraging bit stream data or fingerprinting and going against. I think that the spirit of what we're trying to do in a post third party cookie world so that those controls are critical and I think they have those controls, his publisher, we have collectively be disciplined in what solutions that we we test out and what we eventually adopt. But even when the adoption point arrives, uh definitely it will not be one. There will be multiple because it's just too many use cases to address >>great, great insight there from, from you guys, news corp summer. Let's get back to you. I want to get your thoughts. You've been in many waves of innovation ups and downs were on a new one. Now we talked about the open internet democratization. Journalism is under a lot of pressure now, but there's now a wave of quality people really leaning in towards fighting misinformation, understanding truth and community and date is at the heart of it. What do you see as the new future for journalists, reward journalism is our ways their path forward. >>So there's uh, there's what I hope is going to happen. Um, and then I'm just gonna ignore what could write. Um, you know, there's there's a trend in market right now, a number of fronts, right? So there are marketers who are leaning into wanting to spend their marketing dollars with quality journalists, focusing on bipac owned and operated, really leaning into into supporting those businesses that have been uh, those publishers that have been ignored for years. I really hope that this trend continues. Um We are leaning into into helping um, marketers curate that supply right? And really, uh, you know, speak with their dollars about the things that that they support. Um, and uh, and and value right in market. So I'm hoping that that trend continues and it's not just sort of like a marketing blip. Um, but we will do everything possible to kind of like encourage that behavior and and give people the information they need to find, you know, truly high quality journalism. >>That's awesome chris Summer. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insight on this panel on the cookie list future. Before we go, just quick summary each of you. If you don't mind just giving a quick sound bite or bumper sticker of what we can expect. If you had to throw a prediction For what's going to happen in the next 24 months Chris We'll start with you. >>Uh it's gonna be quite a ride. I think that's an understatement. Um I think that there, I wouldn't be surprised if if google delays the change to the chrome by a couple of months and and may give the industry some much needed time, but no one knows. I guess. I guess I'm not except for someone somewhere deep within chrome. So I think we all have to operate in a way that changes to happen, changes to happen quickly and it's gonna cover across all facets of the industry, all facets of from advertising, marketing. So just be >>prepared. >>Yeah, along the same lines, be prepared, nobody knows what's going to happen in the future. Uh You know, while dancing in this together. Uh I think um for us it's um planning and preparing and also building on what we've already been working on. Um So omni channel ai um creative and I think clients will uh lean more into those different channels, >>awesome. So we'll pick us home, last word. >>I think we're in the throwing spaghetti against the wall stage. Right, so this is a time of discovery of leaning in trying everything out, Learning and iterating as fast as we possibly >>can. Awesome. And I love the cat in the background over your shoulder. Can't stop staring at your wonderful cat. Thanks for coming on chris, Thanks for coming on. This awesome panel industry breakdown of the cookie conundrum. The recipe for success data ai open. Uh The future is here, it's coming, it's coming fast. I'm john fryer with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. Welcome back to the Quant Cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. We're here peter day. The cto of quad cast and crew T cop car, head of product marketing quad cast. Thanks for coming on talking about the changing advertising landscape. >>Thanks for having us. Thank you for having >>us. So we've been hearing this story out to the big players. Want to keep the data, make that centralized control, all the leverage and then you've got the other end. You got the open internet that still wants to be free and valuable for everyone. Uh what's what are you guys doing to solve this problem? Because cookies go away? What's going to happen there? How do people track things you guys are in this business first question? What is quan cast strategies to adapt to third party cookies going away? What's gonna be, what's gonna be the answer? >>Yeah. So uh very rightly said, john the mission, the Qantas mission is the champion of free and open internet. Uh And with that in mind, our approach to this world without third party cookies is really grounded in three fundamental things. Uh First as industry standards, we think it's really important to participate and to work with organizations who are defining the standards that will guide the future of advertising. So with that in mind, we've been participating >>with I. A. B. >>Tech lab, we've been part of their project Triarc. Uh same thing with pre bid, who's kind of trying to figure out the pipes of identity. Di di di di di pipes of uh of the future. Um And then also is W three C, which is the World Wide Web Consortium. Um And our engineers and our engineering team are participating in their weekly meetings trying to figure out what's happening with the browsers and keeping up with the progress they're on things such as google's block. Um The second uh sort of thing is interoperability, as you've mentioned, there are lots of different uh I. D. Solutions that are emerging. You have you I. D. Two point oh, you have live RAM, you have google's flock. Uh And there will be more, there are more and they will continue to be more. Uh We really think it is important to build a platform that can ingest all of these signals. And so that's what we've done. Uh The reason really is to meet our customers where they are at today. Our customers use multiple different data management platforms, the mps. Um and that's why we support multiple of those. Um This is not going to be much different than that. We have to meet our customers where we are, where they are at. And then finally, of course, which is at the very heart of who contrast is innovation. Uh As you can imagine being able to take all of these multiple signals in including the I. D. S. And the cohorts, but also others like contextual first party um consent is becoming more and more important. Um And then there are many other signals, like time, language geo location. So all of these signals can help us understand user behavior intent and interests um in absence of 3rd party cookies. However, uh there's there's something to note about this. They're very raw, their complex, they're messy all of these different signals. Um They are changing all the time, they're real time. Um And there's incomplete information isolation. Just one of these signals cannot help you build a true and complete picture. So what you really need is a technology like AI and machine learning to really bring all of these signals together, combine them statistically and get an understanding of user behavior intent and interests and then act on it, be it in terms of providing audience insights um or responding to bid requests and and so on and so forth. So those are sort of the three um fundamentals that our approach is grounded in which is industry standards, interoperability and and innovation. Uh and you know, you have peter here, who is who is the expert So you can dive much deeper into >>it. Is T. T. O. You've got to tell us how is this going to actually work? What are you guys doing from a technology standpoint to help with data driven advertising in a third party cookie list world? >>Well, we've been um This is not a shock, you know, I think anyone who's been close to his space has known that the 3rd Party Cookie has been um uh reducing inequality in terms of its pervasiveness and its longevity for many years now. And the kind of death knell is really google chrome making a, making the changes that they're gonna be making. So we've been investing in the space for many years. Um and we've had to make a number of hugely diverse investment. So one of them is in how as a marketer, how do I tell if my marketing still working in the world without >>computers? The >>majority of marketers completely reliant on third party cookies today to tell them if they're if they're marketing is working or not. And so we've had to invest heavily and statistical techniques which are closer to kind of economic trick models that markets are used to things like out of home advertising, It's going to establishing whether they're advertising is working or not in a digital environment actually, >>just as >>often, you know, as is often the case in these kind of times of massive disruption, there's always opportunity to make things better. And we really think that's true. And you know, digital measurement has often mistaken precision for accuracy. And there's a real opportunity to kind of see the wood for the trees if you like. And start to come with better methods of measuring the affections of advertising without third party cookies. And in fact to make countless other investments in areas like contextual modeling and and targeting that third party cookies and and uh, connecting directly to publishers rather than going through this kind of bloom escape that's gonna tied together third party cookies. So if I was to enumerate all the investments we've made, I think we'll be here till midnight but we have to make a number of vestments over a number of years and that level investments only increasing at the moment. >>Peter on that contextual. Can you just double click on that and tell us more? >>Yeah, I mean contextual is unfortunately these things, this is really poorly defined. It can mean everything from a publisher saying, hey, trust us, this dissipated about CVS to what's possible now and has only really been possible the last couple of years, which is to build >>statistical >>models of the entire internet based on the content that people are actually consumed. And this type of technology requires massive data processing capabilities. It's able to take advantage of the latest innovations in there is like natural language processing and really gives um computers are kind of much deeper and richer understanding of the internet, which ultimately makes it possible to kind of organize, organized the Internet in terms of the types of content of pages. So this type of technology has only been possible the last two years and we've been using contextual signals since our inception, it's always been massively predictive in terms of audience behaviours, in terms of where advertising is likely to work. And so we've been very fortunate to keep the investment going um and take advantage of many of these innovations that have happened in academia and in kind of uh in adjacent areas >>on the ai machine learning aspect, that seems to be a great differentiator in this day and age for getting the most out of the data. How is machine learning and ai factoring into your platform? >>I think it's, it's how we've always operated right from our interception when we started as a measurement company, the way that we were giving our customers at the time, we were just publishers, just the publisher side of our business insights into who their audience was, were, was using machine learning techniques. And that's never really changed. The foundation of our platform has always been, has always been machine learning from from before. It was cool. A lot of our kind of, a lot of our core teams have backgrounds in machine learning phds in statistics and machine learning and and that really drives our our decision making. I mean, data is only useful if you can make sense of it and if you can organize it and if you can take action on it and to do that at this kind of scout scale, it's absolutely necessary to use machine learning technology. >>So you mentioned contextual also, you know, in advertising, everyone knows in that world that you've got the contextual behavioural dynamics, the behavior that's kind of generally everyone's believing is happening. The consensus is undeniable is that people are wanting to expect an environment where there's trust, there's truth, but also they want to be locked in. They don't wanna get walled into a walled garden, nobody wants to be in the world, are they want to be free to pop around and visit sites is more horizontal scalability than ever before. Yet, the bigger players are becoming walled garden, vertical platforms. So with future of ai the experience is going to come from this data. So the behavior is out there. How do you get that contextual relevance and provide the horizontal scale that users expect? >>Yeah, I think it's I think it's a really good point and we're definitely this kind of tipping point. We think, in the broader industry, I think, you know, every published right, we're really blessed to work with the biggest publishers in the world, all the way through to my mom's vlog, right? So we get to hear the perspectives of publishers at every scale. I think they consistently tell us the same thing, which is they want to more directly connected consumers, they don't wanna be tied into these walled gardens, which dictate how they must present their content and in some cases what content they're allowed to >>present. >>Um and so our job as a company is to really provide level >>the playing field a little bit, >>provide them the same capabilities they're only used to in the walled gardens, but let's give them more choice in terms of how they structure their content, how they organize their content, how they organize their audiences, but make sure that they can fund that effectively by making their audiences in their environments discoverable by marketers measurable by marketers and connect them as directly as possible to make that kind of ad funded economic model as effective in the open Internet as it is in social. And so a lot of the investments we've made over recent years have been really to kind of realize that vision, which is, it should be as easy for a marketer to be able to understand people on the open internet as it is in social media. It should be as effective for them to reach people in the environment is really high quality content as it is on facebook. And so we invest a lot of a lot of our R and D dollars in making that true. We're now live with the Comcast platform, which does exactly that. And as third party cookies go away, it only um only kind of exaggerated or kind of further emphasizes the need for direct connections between brands and publishers. And so we just wanna build the technology that helps make that true and gives the kind of technology to these marketers and publishers to connect and to deliver great experiences without relying on these kind of walled >>gardens. Yeah, the Director Director, Consumer Director audience is a new trend. You're seeing it everywhere. How do you guys support this new kind of signaling from for for that's happening in this new world? How do you ingest the content and just this consent uh signaling? >>Uh we were really fortunate to have an amazing, amazing R and D. Team and, you know, we've had to do all sorts to make this, you need to realize our vision. This has meant things like, you know, we have crawlers which scan the entire internet at this point, extract the content of the pages and kind of make sense of it and organize it uh, and organize it for publishers so they can understand how their audiences overlap with potential competitors or collaborators. But more importantly, organize it for marketers. So you can understand what kind of high impact opportunities are there for them there. So, you know, we've had to we've had to build a lot of technology. We've had to build analytics engines, which can get answers back in seconds so that marketers and publishers can kind of interact with their own data and make sense of it and present it in a way that's compelling and help them drive their strategy as well as their execution. We've had to invest in areas like consent management because we believe that a free and open internet is absolutely reliant on trust and therefore we spend a lot of our time thinking about how do we make it easy for end users to understand who has access to their data and easy for end users to be able to opt out. And uh and as a result of that, we've now got the world's most widely adopted adopted consent management platform. So it's hard to tackle one of these problems without tackling all of them. Were fortunate enough to have had a large enough R and D budget over the last four or five years, make a number investments, everything from consent and identity through context, your signals through the measurement technologies, which really bring advertisers >>and Publishers places together great insight. Last word for you is what's the what's the customer view here as you bring these new capabilities of the platform, uh what's what are you guys seeing as the highlight uh from a platform perspective? >>So the initial response that we've seen from our customers has been very encouraging, both on the publisher side as well as the marketer side. Um I think, you know, one of the things we hear quite a lot is uh you guys are at least putting forth a solution, an actual solution for us to test Peter mentioned measurement, that really is where we started because you cannot optimize what you cannot measure. Um so that that is where his team has started and we have some measurement very, very uh initial capabilities still in alpha, but they are available in the platform for marketers to test out today. Um so the initial response has been very encouraging. People want to engage with us um of course our, you know, our fundamental value proposition, which is that the Qantas platform was never built to be reliant on on third party data. These stale segments like we operate, we've always operated on real time live data. Um The second thing is, is our premium publisher relationships. We have had the privilege of working like Peter said with some of the um biggest publishers, but we also have a very wide footprint. We have first party tags across um over 100 million plus web and mobile destinations. Um and you know, as you must have heard like that sort of first party footprint is going to come in really handy in a world without third party cookies, we are encouraging all of our customers, publishers and marketers to grow their first party data. Um and so that that's something that's a strong point that customers love about us and and lean into it quite a bit. Um So yeah, the initial response has been great. Of course it doesn't hurt that we've made all these are in the investments. We can talk about consent. Um, and you know, I often say that consent, it sounds simple, but it isn't, there's a lot of technology involved, but there's lots of uh legal work involved as it as well. We have a very strong legal team who has expertise built in. So yeah, very good response. Initially >>democratization. Everyone's a publisher. Everyone's a media company. They have to think about being a platform. You guys provide that. So I congratulate Peter. Thanks for dropping the gems there. Shruti, thanks for sharing the product highlights. Thanks for, for your time. Thank you. Okay, this is the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. And what's next? The cookie conundrum. The recipe for success with Kwan Cast. I'm john free with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mm

>> From the Aria Resort in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS Marketplace. (upbeat music) Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. (crowd talking) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at AWS re:Invent 2018, it's a ton of people. We're actually are not in the Sands tonight, we're kicking things off at the Aria at a place called the Quad. It's the AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog Experience Hub. Come on by, they got the foosball, the liquor's out, the food is out, and really kicking off a great event. We're excited to have a first-timer to theCUBE, but a long-timer from the industry. He's Mike Silvey, co-founder and EVP of Moogsoft. Mike, great to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> So it's a little early to ask you your impressions of the show, I'd love to ask you on Thursday afternoon, but so far, what do you think? >> Pretty good, I mean, I've been busy all day. The booth's been, you know, obviously just starting, but we've had meetings with everybody all day so far, and yeah, crazy. >> It's a show like no other. It's really something else. >> Well for a company outside, it's really cool, because we've got a couple of events here at the Quad, on machine learning and on DevOps. We got a booth. We got people you showcase elsewhere. And yeah, very, very, cool. Lovely. >> Right and you're on theCUBE. >> I'm on theCUBE. Hi. >> So for people that aren't familiar with Moogsoft, give us just kind of the quick overview. >> Okay, yeah, so we set up the company to really help transform the economics of the digital migration. So what we mean by that is, you as well know, and all the statistics show that the more you move to modularized software and take advantage of the cloud with Agile, the more costly your operations costs are. In other words, your development productivity goes down because you spent more time doing operations than they do developing. So what we're here to do is make sure that our customers who are all major enterprise corporations, they've got a hybrid world of major enterprise on-premise and then their cloud transition. We're making sure that they can transform, stay agile, but while increasing the development productivity and reducing their operation's costs. It's as simple as that. >> Right, but you were coming at it from a kind of a different perspective. We talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on. You guys are investing really heavily in core technology. Not necessarily building a big sales force or building a big marketing department, but really core technology. So I wonder if you can kind of talk about that strategy and your pursuit of really going down that path. >> Yeah, no, fair. So I guess it comes from our background. If you look at our history, we did ... Well, some of those managers you mentioned. >> I wasn't going to say anything. >> That's a long way back. I'm very old. We did Micromuse years ago at a time of the client server transformation, we did RiverSoft at the time of the dot com boom, and then moved to root cause. You know, today we're in this digital transformation where single faults no longer cause issues. It's a combination of faults over here and micro-changes over there that lead to some kind of service or capacity degradation that leads to customer impact. And the problem our customers have is detecting that impact before the end users are impacted. Our perceived competitors out there, folks like Splunk and ServiceNow, no investment in IP. They're trying to take all technologies and all techniques to solve a problem that they just can't solve. What we've done is invested in unique IP for that problem. So far, 44 patents at this time. We've invested in a huge number of PhD scientists to achieve what we've done. And we've developed some specific technology, for our machine learning, AI, collaborative and social operations to really give you that economic value. >> Right, because your mission is really AI for IT ops, right? >> That's right, perfect. >> I pulled it right off the website. >> Nice. Yeah, so really what that stands for is earlier detection of actual issues. Now on that case, there's an airline that is American that I can't mention, so you can't use it on camera, who last year had a rather public outage. So they had a six hour outage where they were unable to schedule flights because the grand handling software failed. This year, they have Moogsoft. Our software detected an incident that they could action earlier, resolve before it impacted their grand handling system. They realized that if our software hadn't shown them that issue, unknown, unknown, they would have had a four and a half hour minimum outage of flights across the U.S. >> That's expensive. >> Quite expensive. Thank you. (Jeff laughs) So early detection, fewer actual issues, so you think, you've got DevOps teams. One DevOps team has an issue, normally the rest of the teams are impacted, they all spend time investigating. With our software, we show the team that's got the issues, that got the problem. We show everybody their collateral damage, don't waste time. So we improve the productivity there and then we help them remediate much earlier without customer impact, so there you are. >> So we're here at the AWS Marketplace Experience. That's a mouthful. But I'd just love to get your perspective on you said specifically you guys are targeting a lot of investment in IP. How does partnering with Amazon and the Marketplace enable you to really build the company differently than, as you said back in the old days, when you didn't have really kind of a distribution opportunity like this? >> Good question, so I guess we started the company as an on-premise product targeting very large corporations. The kinds of customers we have ... HCL the MSP space, Wipro the MSP space, people like GoDaddy, Yahoo, folks like that, and then some financial services. We started in the on-prem world, and as those customers have started their migration to hybrid, it became really clear that Amazon was focusing on that area as well. And what the AWS Marketplace has allowed us to do is massively shorten frankly our sales cycle with our customers with very large scale deals. But also help those customers adopt our software much more quickly as well. It works really well for Amazon, it works really well for our customers, and works really well for us. Earlier value, you had much bigger customer adoption much more quickly and the Marketplace benefits because we help those customers transition over to the Marketplace much more quickly as well. To take advantage of Agile. >> Right, and I don't think a lot of people give enough credit, especially for a smaller company, how hard it is to do business with a big company. Not because of anything with the technology, but just in terms of getting through, getting it, being it approved. >> Commercials. >> Just being an approved vendor, you say the commercials can be the biggest hurdle to actually closing the deal. It has nothing to do with whether the buyer wants to buy it or whether it's a great technology fit. So by using the Marketplace, you basically just taking all that difficulty right off the table. >> The Marketplace has the enterprise contract. If the customer has an enterprise contract, they could just buy our software, no EULA, no commercials with us. That's it, thank you very much. We get paid, everybody's happy. And those customers get to save money as well, but I probably shouldn't say that. (Jeff laughs) And then how's it been just working with Amazon as a partner? Some people are scared. They're like, "You know, they're so big. "And if they find something they like, they're just going to "roll up it in the big machine." So how's it been working with Amazon as a partner? >> Quite amazing actually. I don't want to get to sycophantic with Amazon here, but ... First, we were a tiny company really with 200 people. Okay, we're selling above our weight, I guess, with the customers we have. They changed the Marketplace to do deals for us. I've been amazed. So we founded the company on the principle we wanted to bring joy to our customers, meaning we wanted to be agile, customer focused very customer centric. I've never met a large corporation like Amazon who's so customer focused. So with particular customers, we've done Marketplace transactions. Very high value, very large scale. Amazon's changed the Marketplace in ours to facilitate those deals for the customers. I mean in terms of the engagements we have with the CloudWatch team and the CloudTrial and the AWS management teams, they're working with us on product changes to help those customers for us. It's really, really cool. Totally different experience. Something you don't expect from a very large corporation. >> Well, I think it's great 'cause you have alignment 'cause they really still care abut the customer first. They probably love having you as a partner, but not before they like the customer. It sounds like a good symbiotic relationship. >> It's been really good. >> All right, well, Mike, I'm going to track you down on Thursday night and get your impressions of the show. >> Super. >> Because you're going to be blown away. Thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. >> Thanks very much. Cheers. >> All right, he's Mike. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS Marketplace and Service Center Experience Hub at the Aria. Come on by. (upbeat music)

>> From the Aria resort in Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering AWS marketplace. Brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hey everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are kicking off AWS re:Invent, I don't know how many people are here, I'm guessing 60, could be 70, I don't know, there's a lot of people here in Vegas and we're excited. We'll be here for nine days of continuous coverage spread out over three calendar days, and we're kicking it of tonight. We're at the AWS Marketplace and service catalog experience here at the Quad over at the Aria, so stop on by, there's a lot of cool things going on, and we're excited to have a CUBE alumni on to kick things off. He's Sahir Azam, the SVP of Cloud from MongoDB. It's great to see you. >> Thank you Jeff, great to be here, exciting week coming up at AWS re:Invent. >> Are you ready? >> I think I am ready. It's going to be a long week in Vegas, but it'll be a good week. >> All I could think was all those posts before we got started, said how to plan your time at re:Invent, >> They all say drink a lot of water. >> Drink a lot of water, stay hydrated. So we last caught up at Summit in New York City, I believe. >> Yeah AWS Summit in New York. >> So that was last summer, so how have things been going since then? >> Things have been great, obviously, the business is doing really well, especially our cloud products MongoDB Atlas, and MongoDB stitch have been an absolute rocket ship for the company and that's why we're here, is just really help the community, and drive even more adoption of our technologies in the market. >> So is that a big strategic, I mean obviously, it was a big strategic move for you guys inside, but I'm just curious some of the thought process behind, you know, offering a database as a service via a partner like Amazon. What were some of the things you were thinking about, and how's it kind of turned out based on what your expectations were? >> Sure, yeah, I mean I think, if you look at just overall adoption of MongoDB, obviously you know, we're one of the most widely adopted databases in the world, given we're open source, and really a pioneer in modern non-relational databases. >> Right. >> We've always been heavily used in AWS, even from the early days, nine or 10 years ago and in many ways we feel like we grew up in the cloud, as a company, given just our technology and adoption in that marketplace. Now, what's changed is I think probably, five years ago or so, we really started to hear customers say, you know we really want to get out of the business of operationalizing and securing, and managing these databases, and would rather you give us the same technology, the database we love but deliver it as a service on our cloud platform of choice. So we started on a project internally, to build MongoDB Atlas, which is now available in 15 plus regions on AWS, as well as other cloud platforms as a global database as a service, to help those customers move even faster >> Right >> with MongoDB. >> And it's been about a year right, since you since you released it? >> It's been about three years for MongoDB Atlas, but especially in the last year we've started actually selling out was through the AWS marketplace. >> Right, right. >> Which is really fantastic. >> So how does the marketplace change? I mean obviously, Amazon's got a great scale, and it's a nice sales force, sales presence for you to leverage so, how has that relationship gone? >> Yeah, it's gone really well actually, and especially in large enterprises. I mean, we have large automotives, we've got manufacturers, we've got you know telcos, that have sort of all procured our technolog6y through the AWS marketplace. And I think the benefit for us as a partner, really comes in two ways, first and foremost, its awareness, there are definitely some AWS customers that find their technologies by searching on it in the marketplace and when we pop up, and say okay great this is the databases service from the people behind MongoDB. That instantly just drives our awareness up, and then secondly, it drives really good alignment between our sales teams and Amazon sales team. So the AWS sales force is now aligned and incented to work with us on driving joint opportunity for MongoDB, and now Amazon customers. >> So is there a lot of joint, kind of opportunities that you guys are working together? >> Yup. >> I guess my perception would be that more the marketplace is, you know I find it, I order it, I install it, versus more kind of a joint enterprise sale, but maybe that's not. >> For us it's actually been really interesting on the joint enterprise sale, where it's been, you know they're really that high touch model because it's beneficial for customers to be able to buy their technology through the marketplace, and it's also beneficial for our go-to-market, and our sales teams to be aligned and not feel like we're competing but are actually driving an outcome together for the customer. >> Right, so partnering with Amazon's been a good experience, I know a lot of people are kind of afraid, do we to be partner with these guys, are they big, are they going to you know roll up our functionality? But you guys had a great experience. >> Yeah, I mean the reality is we there are definitely database technologies from Amazon that we compete with. But that's true of probably every technology vendor, and where there are places for us to work together, and deliver real customer value, I mean we're the most widely adopted modern, non-relational kind of database on the planet. >> Right, right. >> So Amazon probably sees that demand, and it's been a good working relationship through the marketplace team, especially at Amazon. >> Good, so I wonder if you can share some other trends you've seen in the marketplace, especially as you said you guys are doing a lot of joint customer activity, what are some of the things you're picking up on, what are you hearing out on the streets? >> Sure I definitely think server list continues to rise. Right, this past year with G8 MongoDB Stitch, which is our server list platform that makes it really easy to extend the power of the database all the way through mobile devices, client applications, and really have a data architecture and not just think of Mongo as something that's used on the backend, so we've been seeing quite a bit of adoption of that platform, and in particular for use cases where MongoDB Atlas is used with complimentary AWS services. So if you want to use AWS Lambda with a MongoDB database, the best way to do so is with Stitch. You want to tie you know Kinesis and streaming technologies into a database for MongoDB, Stitch makes those integrations natively in these other AWS services really easy. >> Right, so I'm curious get your perspective on kind of what percentage, don't share anything you're not supposed to share, of the sales on these things are, new kind of projects inside these enterprises, versus people doing migrations, because there's always this big debate right on legacy? You know you're going to lift and shift, and move it all, versus let that stuff just do what it does, and really the opportunities on Greenfield. >> Yeah, I think, it's probably hard to quantify, but we certainly see a few different patterns. First and foremost, there's like large enterprises that are lifting and shifting, and migrating those applications from on-premises data centers and into the cloud. And really what we see is an opportunity, not just to lift and shift, and manage things the same expensive slow way, but to actually modernize at time of migration, as well. So you can adopt the benefits of a platform as a service, or a database a service like ours, while you move into the cloud. So that helps customers move faster and operate in a much more economical way. So I think that's sort of one piece of it, and then of course there's all sorts of new modern applications, whether it be Connected Car or IOT platforms, modern mobile applications, we're seeing a fair share of like new, fancy applications being built, as well. We definitely see both, and I think for us, one of the things that's unique is given there's been so much MongoDB adoption in AWS, we're seeing a migration of customers that want to get out of the business of running the database, and want to have us manage it for them in the form of MongoDB Atlas. There's that third camp of people are already in Amazon, using MongoDB, but are now saying I want to move it into Atlas because it provides a much better way, and in fact, it's probably the best way to run MongoDB in the cloud. >> Right, right, it makes a ton of sense. I'm curious I'm the first one though, when you talk about modernizing while you're lifting and shifting, or while you're shifting over from legacy infrastructure, what are the key things without doing a complete rewrite, that people can do kind of a modernization of the application, 'cause that's kind of an interesting concept? >> I think it's two things, there are certain applications that people don't want to touch and change that much, and those are probably good candidates to lift and shift, and try to minimize the amount of change on. But frankly those are oftentimes not the most strategic applications anymore, they might be important to keep the lights on, but they're not the ones that are driving the customer experience or driving the revenue, you know new opportunities for businesses. Many of those applications are actually being kind of decomposed from monolithic old technology stacks and legacy tools to more modern micro services based architectures, and what we're seeing, is oftentimes the trigger for that modernization is a cloud migration. So in many ways what we're saying is, get off of a legacy relational database technology, move to the cloud, but don't now operate it the same way you always have, actually consume it as a service, and that's what's really going to unlock all that developer velocity, the elasticity, the cost savings people expect from the cloud. >> Right, so is the the database really the key piece for kind of a modernization effort, without rewriting the entire application? >> I think it's one of the most important pieces, for sure. I mean we like to say that the database, in many ways, is the heart of the application, because an application without data is really sort of generic and useless. So it is definitely one of the more complicated areas, and that's why we spend so much time with customers, building technology that makes it easier for them to modernize, leverage new capabilities, even if it's only new features in an application, versus a rewrite of the whole old model right with the block. >> Alright, Sahir, I think they open the doors, I think AWS is coming in. >> The rush is coming in. It's officially underway, so I know you got a busy week, I got a busy week. >> Likewise. >> Thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. >> Absolutely. >> And stopping by. >> Yeah great to see you. >> Alright, great to see you. >> Alright, thanks for stopping by. He's Sahir, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the AWS marketplace and service catalog experience, at the Aria, stop on by, see ya. (dance music)

>>Ed, welcome to the Cube. All right, Thanks guys. Good >>To see you. Thanks. Good to see you as well, >>John. Okay. Ed runs Biz dev for Cloudera, Industry veteran, worked at VMware. Ed, gotten to know you the past year. You guys have been doing great. What a difference one year makes, right? I mean, absolutely. Tell us, just let's start it off with what's happened in a year. I mean, you know, here at Hadoop World Cloudera, the ecosystem. Just give us your view of your perspective of what a difference one year makes. >>I think more than double is probably the, the fastest answer I could give you, which is, I mean, even looking around at the conference, it's, it itself is literally double from what it was last year. But in terms of the number of partners that have entered the market and really decided to work with, with Cloudera, but also in general, just the, the, the, the scope and size of the ecosystem itself, investors from every angle. You've got companies really well-branded marquee companies like Oracle coming into the mix and saying, Hey, Hadoop is the, is the real deal and we need to invest here. Marquee companies like IBM and EMC also doing the same. And of course, you know, as a result, you know, lots and lots of customer interest in the technology. And Cloudera's been fortunate to have been in the market early and really made the right investments with the right team. And so we're able to serve a lot of those customer needs. So it's been really, it's been a fantastic year for the company. >>So we had a great day yesterday with Cloudera. We had Kirk on, we had AER on twice, who by the way went viral with his modern warfare review, but we had Jeff Harmar Baer on, so we had pretty much the brain trust, Mike and Michaelson. Yep. The brain trust, the Cloudera. So we talked about the risk factors for Cloudera. Obviously you guys are number one, you've been kind of had untouchable lead and then all of a sudden boom competition. So Mike talked about that. So the strategy and the product side, they addressed, you're on the, the biz dev side, so you know, when you were number one, everyone wants to stand next to you and your phone rings off the hook from tier one partners all the way down to anyone's just getting in the business. Who wants a big data strategy on the execution. Now, what are you guys doing right now to, to continue your lead on the, on the sales marketing biz dev? I mean, I know you get the partner program, but what's your strategy for Phil, how to continue >>In that lead? The, the beautiful thing is honestly, our strategy hasn't changed at all. And I know that might sound counterintuitive, but we started off with a, a really crisp vision. And we want, what we wanna do is create a very attractive platform for partners. And, and, you know, one of the core, you know, sort of corporate strategy, Edix for Quadera is a recognition that the end of the day, the platform itself, Hado is an input into a solution. And Quadra is not likely to deliver the complete solution to market. Instead, it's going to be companies like Dell, for example, or it's going to be companies on the, on the ISV side like Informatica, which you're gonna deliver not only a base platform, but also the, the, the, the BI or analytics or data integration technologies on top. And as a result, what we've done is we've really focused in on creating a very attractive platform to vendors to build on. >>And one of the, I think one of the biggest misconceptions that I'm excited about that, you know, we are now having an opportunity to correct and that's a result, frankly, of the additional competitive dynamic. And I think the, the Wiki bond team pointed that out rather pointedly in their most recent articles. But is, is the sort of the lack of understanding around what CDH is and also the, some of the other investments that we're making to create a truly attractive platform for vendors to build on. And you know, I mean, I think you, you may have familiarity with exactly what CDH is, but for the sake of the audience here, what I'd like to do is say, say, first off, you know, first and foremost this is a hundred percent free in Apache license open source. But more importantly, it is everything that we build on the platform, meaning it's completely full featured. >>We put all of that out in the open. There's no turbo version of Hadoop that we've got hiding in the closet for our, our four pay customers. We're absolutely making investment. But I think, you know, when you think about it from the vendor perspective, and that's my bias. So I always think about, I treat all of the potential partners as really my customer. And when you think about it from that perspective, the things that matter most to vendors, number one, transparency. They need to understand exactly what our business model is, where we plan to make money and where we plan, don't make money. They need to know what we're really good at developing and what we're not so good at developing. And sort of where we draw the, the boundaries around that investment. I think, you know, a testament to that, for example, is tomorrow we're hosting a partner summit. >>So after this event, there are gonna be over 60 individuals, but they max two per per vendor. So we're gonna have over 35 vendors attending this event. And what they're gonna hear from is our entire management team is as deeply as we can and as open as we can. And you know, it, it's, it's, it's funny, you know, I think I saw this article in Forbes the other day about Cloudera. It was this, the title of the article was something like Spies Like Us. And it it, and it, what it highlighted was that some, some competitor of Cloudera had actually hired a, a, a competitive intelligence agency to go on and, and try to engage with, you know, and, and try to learn more about Cloudera. And so they went on to Cora, which we have a lot of active engineers on Cora. And they, you know, they went out and they asked a bunch of product related questions to our to, to someone on Cora. And our engineers immediately responded and they started being very transparent, completely open to what, what they're building and why they're building it. And the article basically summarized to say, Hey, you know what, you know, clearly some people aren't all that sophisticated in figuring out, you know, who they're talking to. And it's really important to do that. And they got the absolute wrong conclusion. Our engineers are actually encouraged and in fact rewarded for being extremely transparent in the market because we believe that it's transparency will ultimately allow us to be that platform vendor. >>And that's what attracts me. Jeff Hummer Bucker, who's active on core as well, he's recruiting there too. So you guys are out engaging the community. Yeah. So just let me just review, cuz this is cool that you're addressing this because Hortonworks and others, and I'll say the name Hortonworks has been pumping up the PR and creating a lot of noise around open and kind of Depositioning Cloudera. So you guys are completely open, a hundred percent Hadoop, open source, everything you build in, in every way, in every way. You have engineers building core, you've got tools and all the other stuff is being built in Cloudera then contributing into the community. >>Actually it's the other way around. We build it and the community@apache.org. So all of our technology is built@apache.org. It's, it's developed there. It's, it's, it's initially shared there. And then we have another team inside our company that pulls down bits from apache.org and then assembles them and integrates them. So it's really, it's a really key thing. And there's no, we do, we have no bits that we don't develop@apache.org that are part of cdh. So there, I mean there can be no mistake that everything that that is in CDH is everything we got. >>So CDH is free. >>It is free >>And every it's open source. It's open you >>Charge enterprise edition. That's the only thing that's different you guys charge >>Yeah. Which is your management console, right. >>Management >>Suite and all kinds of >>The tools. And that's not free and that's not open source. That's correct. Just to be clear. Yep. But so AER took us yesterday through, I don't know, half a dozen probably open source projects and then the one is the, the management console. And that's what you charge for, that's where you're gonna make money? >>Yeah. We, we manufacture, essentially we manufacture two products, but we sell one. So we manufacture the Quadera distribution, including Apache Duke, that's free. It's free. And then we all in open source and built it Apache and, and really heavily tested and well documented and, and, and well integrated. And then we also manufacture quadera Enterprise, which includes support and indemnities and warranties for that full featured CDH product and also includes the Quadra management suite. And >>That's a subscription. >>And that's a subscription. And so customers can, can run cdh, they can then buy and license Cloudera Enterprise and then someday if they decide they don't need Cloud Air Enterprise for whatever reason, if they're, if their team are scripting wizards and they've decided that they, you know, they don't need the extra opportunity for being able to track all of the things that Cloudier Enterprise allows 'em to, they can step off of cloud enterprise and continue to use full feature to do as they see >>Fit. So take an example of one of your partners that you announced this week. NetApp NetApp's gonna package your cdh CDH and the subscription Correct. To their, their customers. And then they're gonna let their channel either, you know, they'll pre bule it or do a reference architecture, you'll get paid for that subscription that's bundled. That's correct. Will make money off of its filers. Yes. And the customer gets a package solution. >>Exactly. Right. And in fact, that's another important thing that you know, is probably worth discussing, which is our go to market model. I don't know if you guys had a chance to talk with anyone yesterday on that, but I'm responsible for our channel strategy and one of the key things that we've agreed to as a, as a company is that we really are gonna go to market through channel partners. Yeah. >>We covered sgi, that was a great announcement. >>Yep, a >>Hundred percent >>As, as close as we can get. Okay. I mean that is our, he's >>Still doing the direct deals. You still have that belly to belly sales force because it's still early, right? So there's a mix of direct and indirects, not a pure >>Indirect, but as, and that's only, that's only as we're able to, until we're able to ramp up our partners fully, in which case we really want our, the current team that is working belly to belly to really support our partners. >>So all so VMware like, but I I wanted to ask >>You VMware, like NetApp, like very similar. >>Yes. Very, very NetApp. Like NetApp probably 75%, you know. Exactly. What are the similarities and differences with VMware in, in the ecosystem? You know it well, >>I do know it well. Yeah. I spent several years working at VMware and you know, I think, I mean the first and most obvious difference is that when you think, when I think about platform software in general, you know, there are a few different flavors of platform. One of the things that makes Hadoop very unique, very unique relative to other platforms is that it, not only is it Apache license, but it really is, it's dependent upon other external innovators to, to create the entire full value of the ecosystem. So, or, or you know, of the solution, right? So unlike for example, so like, let's take a platform like everyone's familiar with like Apple iTunes, right? What happens is Apple creates the platform and they put it kind of in the middle on top of and behind the scenes is the innovator, the app builder, he builds it, he publishes it on Apple, and then Apple controls all access to the >>Customer. Yep. >>That's not adu, right? Right. Let's take VMware or Red Hat for example. So in that case, they publish a platform they own and control the, the absolute structure and boundaries of what that platform is. And then on top of that application vendors build and then they deliver to the, the customer. But you know, at the end of the day, the, you know, the relationship really is, you know, from that external innovator straight down, and there's no, there's, you know, there's no way for them to really modify the platform. And you take kadu, which is a hundred percent Apache licensed to open source, and you really, you really open up the opportunity for vendors to take ADU as an input into their system and then deliver it straight to their customers or for customers themselves to say, I want straight up vanilla Hadoop, I'm gonna go this way and I'm gonna add on my own be app of applications. So you're, we're seeing all sorts of variants right now in the market. We're seeing software as a service being delivered that's based on Hadoop. There was a great announcement a few weeks ago from a company named Tidemark, previously known as Per Ferry, and they're taking all of cdh. They're, but they're, the customer doesn't know that they're, and what they're doing is they're delivering software as a, as a service based on adu. >>Yeah. So I mean, you know, we are psyched that you're clearing this up because obviously we're seeing, we saw all that stuff, but I really think that indirect strategy as a home run, I'm said it when we talked about the SGI thing, and it's accelerates you guys, you enable, but you know, channels is an interesting business. I mean the, you have to have pure transparency as you mentioned, but they need comp, people need confidence and, and they don't, they worry about competition. So channel conflict is always the big issue, right? Right. Is Cloudera gonna compete with us? So talk that, talk us through that, that strategy. So obviously the market's growing, new solutions are coming around the corner, These guys wanna make money. I mean channel, it's all about, you know, what have you done for me today? >>Right. That, that is exactly right. And you know what, that's, that's why we decided on the channel strategy specifically around our product is because we recognize that each and every single potential channel partner of ours can actually innovate themselves on top of and create differentiation. And we're not an obstacle to that process. So we provide our platform as an input and we're capable of managing that platform, but ultimately creating differentiation is all in the hands of our partners and we're there to help, but it gives them wide latitudes. So take for example, the differences between Dell and NetApp solution, they are very different reference architectures leveraging the exact same platform. >>Yeah. And they have to make money. I mean, the money making side of it is, you know, people have kind of, don't really talk about that, but, you know, channel partners loyalty is all about who can help them make cash. Right. Right. Exactly. What are you hearing there in terms of the ecosystem? Has the channels Bess and the partnerships or the more as size, what's the profile of your, of your partners? I mean, can you give us the breakdown of Sure. We have what you look like from Dell. We know Dell and NetApp, but they're gear guys. But, >>So a big part of our strategy is to work with IHVs and then Ihv resellers. So you're talking about companies like Dell, like sgi, like NetApp, for example, independent hardware manufacturers. Another part of our strategy though, and a key, a key requirement from our customers is to work with a whole variety of ISVs, particularly in the data management space. So you've got really marquee companies in the database space like IBM's Netezza or Terradata. You've got in companies like Informatica and Talent, you've got companies on the BI side, like Micro Strategy and Tableau. These kinds of technologies are currently in play at our customers that have made substantial investments. And ultimately they want to be able to continue to leverage them with the data platform, whichever data platform that they end up choosing. So we invest considerably there. A big part of that has been our Qera Connect partner program. >>It's an opportunity for us to help the customer to understand which technologies work and work well with, with our platform. It's also an opportunity for us to engage directly and assist the vendor. So one of the things that we created as part of that program is first off, immediate and absolute discounted access to any part of our training. Second, lots of free information, access to our world class knowledge base, access to our support team, direct access to our support team. The, the vendors also get access to a developer portal that would created specifically for them. So if, if you think about it this way, Hadoop gets built@apache.org, but solutions don't get built@apache.org. Right? So what we're really trying to help our vendors do is be able to develop their solutions by having real clear visibility to the API level points of Hadoop. They're not necessarily interested in, in trying to figure out how, how MR two works or, or contributing code to that. >>But they absolutely are interested in figuring out how to run and execute their software on top of a do. So when I think about the things that matter to create an attractive platform, and at the end of the day, that's what we're really trying to do, first and foremost is transparency, right? Second really ultimately is really clear visibility to the APIs and the documentation of that platform so that there's no ambiguity that the, the vendor, this is the user in this case, it's building a solution, can absolutely absorb all of that content really cleanly. And then ultimately, you know, I think it's customers, right? Users of the technology. And I think our download numbers are, they're, they're, there's something we're proud of. >>We, we are, we're hearing good feedback. I mean, the feedback we hear from folks is, yeah, I love how they take away the complexity of handling versions and whatnot. So, you know, I think totally is a great way, The CDH is a great bundle. You know, the questions that we have for you is what are you hearing about the other products, the ones you're actually selling? Does that create the lock in? So that's something that we asked Elmer directly, you know, is that the, is that the lock in and what happens when the deployments get so big? You know, >>I mean, the way, I >>Don't really see an issue there, but that's what people are afraid of. I mean, that's kind of the, it's more of fear. I mean, some people can use that fear and, and >>Play against. I think, I think what we've seen in other markets is that management tools are ultimately interchangeable. And the only way that we're gonna retain a customer is by out innovating the competition on the management side, the lock in, the lock in component, as you will, is not really part of our business model. It's very difficult to achieve with an Apache licensed platform and a management suite that sits on outside of that, that licensed artifact. So ultimately, if we don't owe innovate, we're gonna lose. So we're working on the innovation and that's, >>How's the hiring go? Oh, go ahead. >>I, I had a, I wanted to come back to that. You mentioned download numbers. Can you share the numbers >>With the others? I can't, I can't share them publicly, but what I can say is that they've been on an incredible trajectory. Okay. That, and what we've seen is month to month growth rates, every single month we continue to see really significant growth rates. >>And then I, I had a follow up question on, you talked about the, the partner program. How do you manage all those partners? How do you prioritize them? I mean, the, the hardware vendors, it's pretty easy. There's a few big whales, but the, the ISVs, they're, I mean, your phone, like John said, must be ringing off the hook. How do you juggle that and, and can you do it better than VMware, for example? >>Well, we do it, we handle the, the influx of partner interest in two ways. One, we've been relatively structured with the Quadra Connect partner program, and we make real investments there. So we have dedicated folks that are there to help. We have our engineering team that is actually feeding inputs, and we're, we're leveraging some of the same resources that we provide to our customers and feeding those directly to our partners as well. So that's one way that we handle it. But the other way, frankly, is, I mean, customers help here having access to and, and a real customer population, they help you set priorities pretty quickly. And so we're able to understand what we track in inside of our systems, which, which technologies our customers use. So we know, for example, what percentage of our customer base has has SaaS installed, and we'd like to use that with a, do we know which percentage of our customer base is currently running on Red Hat and which is not. So having core visibility, that helps us to prioritize. >>How about incentives? I mean, obviously channel businesses as, like I said, very fickle people, you know, you know the channel business, I spent, you know, almost a decade in, in HP's channel organization and you know, you have to provide soft dollars. There's a lot of kind of blocking and tackling. You guys are clearly building out that tier one with the SGIs of the world and other vendors, and then get the partner connect program for kinda everyone else who's gonna grow up into a tier one. Yeah. Training, soft dollars incentives. You guys have that going yet, or is the >>Roadmap? We do. And in fact, you know, in addition to the sort of more wide publicized relationships you see with companies like Dell and Cloudera, we're actually building a very successful network of independent ours. And the VAs in general. What we do is we prioritize and select ours based on the top level relationships that we have, because that really helps them to hone in. They've got validation from, for, for example, someone that sells resells. SGI is an organization that now is heard really loud and clear from sgi the, the specific platform configurations that they're gonna represent to their customers, and they ultimately wanna represent them directly. And how we make investments is we're, I mean, the investments we're making ultimately in our sales org, I'm gonna lose the word direct from that conversation because our sales org is being built to help our partners succeed. And I think that's where you're, >>The end game is to go completely indirect and have all your support go into managing that channel. What, what's the mix of revenue generation from your partners? Obviously as a, you know, with sgi they have pre-built channels that you're funneling in, you got NetApp and they're wrapping their products and services around it. How much is services and how much is a solution specifically? Do you have any visibility or a feel for that at this >>Point? I mean, services relative to, You mean for Cloudera particularly, or for our >>Partner? No, for the, for the part. I mean, if I'm a partner, I'm like, Hey, okay, I'm gonna use cdh. I'm on bundles. I don't mind paying you a wholesale if I'm gonna be able to throw off more cash on, you know, deployment and cloud and services, et cetera. And or if I'm a product manufacturer, a product, a solution I fund you in. I need to have that step >>Up a absolutely great question. So depending upon the partner we're dealing with, they like to either monetize or generate their revenue in different ways. So for example, NetApp, NetApp is a company that has very limited services, and their, their focus is a business is really on delivering hardware and software configured together. And they, they rely heavily on a services channel to fulfill, you take in, in contrast to a company like, for example, Dell, which has a very successful services business and really is excited about having service offerings around Hadoop. So it depends upon the company. But when we talk about our VAR channel in particular, one of the things that's a, in an internal acronym, but I'll share it publicly here. We, we call our, our supervisors and what makes them super and why, why we've selected the, the, the organizations that we are selecting right now to be our bar is that they not only can fulfill orders for hardware and software, particularly data management or infrastructure software, but they also have a services team on hand because we recognize that there is a services opportunity with every Hadoop deployment. And we want our partners to have that. So as an organization, we're structuring our, our services staff to facilitate and enable our partners not to be sold >>Directly. Okay. So that's the follow up that I had tomorrow when the partners ask, Okay, what do you want to be when you're really growing up? Is it services, is it software? >>Is it Carter is a software company, Crewing through, >>Oh, er we kind of got ett, well, he didn't say it, but we said it's a operating system. Yeah. >>So given that, so given that, I mean, you can make money on services, right? People need services. Okay, great. >>And partners will make that money for >>Us. And, and you know, early on you, you had to do some of that and you're, you've been very clear about where it's going. It's hard to make money in software when you're given all the software away for free. Well, >>We're not giving all >>The software. I know you've got that piece now, but, but here's my question. As ADU goes into the enterprise, which is clearly doing, is that that whole bundling, like what you're doing with NetApp is that really ultimately how you're gonna start to, to monetize and, and successfully monetize your software, >>Is by pushing it through >>Yeah. Packaging and that bundling that solution, in other words, our enterprise customer is gonna be more receptive to that solution package than say the, the fridge that has been using Hadoop for the last >>Two or three years. I think there's no question about it. If you, if you look at what Quadra Enterprise does, I don't know if, if you've had a chance to attend any of the sessions, maybe where Quadra Enterprise is, is currently being demonstrated. >>We just had Alex Williams as about on the air. Did a review, >>Okays >>Been going good and impressed with it? >>Yeah, there's no question about it. And I, I don't, and Alex probably hasn't seen the new version that, you know, our team is working on and it's, you know, quietly working on in the background. Incredible, incredible developments in, And that's really a function of when you have direct access to so many customers and you're getting so much input and feedback and they're the kinds of access to the kinds of customers we ultimately wanna serve. So real enterprises, what you get is really fast innovation from a really talented team that knows to do well. I mean, we are years ahead on the management side. Absolutely. Years ahead. And you know, I, so I was a guy who worked at VMware for several years, and I can tell you that while the hypervisor itself was, was a core component to VMware success, the monetization strategy was very squarely around vCenter. Yeah. Yes. Out. And we're not ignorant to that. Yeah. >>You can learn a lot from your VMware experience cause absolutely. The, the market changed significantly. And, you know, >>There were free hypervisors available all of a sudden. VMware itself had a free hypervisor. We had, we had VMware server and we had also our VMware player products, right? And those were all free. And they were very good technology. They were the best available in the market for free. And they were better, in my opinion, they were better than anything else. Open or not. No, our time >>Too, since still >>Are, they were, they, they were, they were superior products in every way. But yet how VMware was successful was recognizing that in the interest of running a production environment with an sola, you need management software. And they've also built the best management software. And there's no question that we understand that strategy and >>A phenomenal ecosystem. I mean, there's the >>Similarities, right? They did. And you, and the, and the ecosystem was in, in large part predicated on transparency act, very clear access to the APIs and a willingness to help partners be successful with those APIs. And ultimately drawing a very tight box about what the company wanted to do and didn't want to do. >>I mean, look, you're not, you're not gonna lose friends when you make people money. That's my philosophy, right? I agree. So when you're in that business where you can come in and enable a channel and have options on your growth strategy, which you do, I mean, you can say, Okay, bundling, I can go, you know, I can have this sold direct, or at least as long as you've got the options, you can grow with that market. So, you know, again, the, it's a money making opportunity for the partnerships, but there's >>More than that, right? Because you mentioned Apple, iTunes, Oracle's another example. And the way you make money with Apple and the way you make money with Oracle is different than the way you make money with VMware and presumably Cloudera. >>Yeah, I mean, our strategy is, if you make this base platform easier to install, more reliable, and you make it ultimately, you know, really rock solid from an integration standpoint, more people are gonna use it. So what happens when more people use it? First thing that happens is more solu, it's out there. So it's more solutions get built. When more solutions get built, then you see more clusters get developed. When more clusters are out there, they start to move into production. And then they, they need an sla when they need an sla, Cloudera and Enterprise gets purchased. But along that path, when those solutions got built, guess what else happened? More cloud units got sold, more servers got sold, more networking. Gear got sold, more services got created. You get, you get ultimately more operating systems got sold, more databases, got data into them, more BI clients got created. The ecosystem is deep and rich, and a lot of people stand to make money hop >>In people. The water's great. >>What about, what about support? Okay, so, you know, the other guys are saying, We're just gonna make money on support. I mean support, You guys still are doing support, right? I mean, you're selling >>Support. There's no question. Quad Enterprise contains two things, right? The management suite and support this is, this is not uncomplicated technology and having a world class support team is of value and customers do want to pay for that value. But we, we believe that support in and of itself is not enough. And that ultimately, when you wanna deliver an sla, being able to call when you have a problem is the wrong approach. You want to be proactive and understand the problem well in advance of it actually occurring. That's really important. When, for example, if you're a customer, a lot of our customers have a data pipeline that >>They, they're building out basically. I mean they're, it's, it's new and emerging. So they're building out, It's not just support. They need other tools. >>Yeah. And it building out I think is an understatement for some, where some of our customers are. I mean, when you have a thousand node cluster that you're operating Yeah, Yeah. To, that's mission critical to your business. I don't think that's building out anymore. I think that's an investment in a technology that's mission critical. And what you wanna see when you have a mission critical technology is you wanna know early and often when a problem may emerge. Not, Oh, oh my gosh, we have a problem now I need to go, you know, phone a friend, phone a friend is, is kind of a last resort. We offer that. But what we really do is, and that's the, that's the beau, That's why we don't decouple our support from our management suite. It's not about phone a friend. It's about understanding the operation of your cluster the entire way through 24. >>And the other op the other thing that people don't talk about in the support is that with open source, a lot of support gets handled in the community as well. So like That's right. So in a way, you're already pre cannibalized with the community >>By us and by others. Absolutely. But you, you'll never see to that Forbes article I referenced earlier. You will never, you will not see our, our engineers are not trained to withhold information and under any circumstances to anyone free or paying. Yeah. This is about getting, You >>Don't wanna hold back your business. I mean, you have nothing to hide. It's open rights. >>Open source. It's open. And we're here to help. We're here to help. Whether you're paying us or not, >>This is value to that anticipatory >>Remediation. Yeah. That's what you're packaging and clearing up the air. Great. Great cube guest, you're awesome on the cube. Gonna have you more on because great to get the info out there. Really impressed with the channel strategy. Love the love the growth strategy, the cloud air. You guys are really impressive. I'm really, really impressed to see that you guys got everything pumping on all cylinders, Kirk, and you are cranking out on the business execution. We're in the team playing this chest mask open. Perfect. So great. Congratulations. Great. Thanks. You guys just in the financing. >>Oh, thank you as >>Well. Hey, Ed from Cloudera, clearing it up here inside the cube. We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back with more video. >>Thanks guys. All right.